[HN Gopher] 65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, an...
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65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they
outperform
Author : 7777777phil
Score : 444 points
Date : 2026-01-06 14:45 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (philippdubach.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (philippdubach.com)
| ozempicgandalf wrote:
| Well who would have thought that negativity attracts more
| discussion. Unfortunately this is also where mainstream media has
| been going for a while..
| appreciatorBus wrote:
| 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.
| ozim wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Somtetimes people write "This", and that's apparently a no-
| no. You are told to just upvote.
| ozim wrote:
| Maybe there should be a setting for hiding such short
| replies or something like "shadow ban", you can write
| "thanks" or "This." and only person posting it will see
| their own "thanks".
|
| Downside is that there is still some cost to it, like
| writing "please" and "thank you" to LLM...
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| 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.
| goatlover wrote:
| 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.
| homo_economicus wrote:
| BREAKING: "HN is negative" confirmed by numbers!! I didn't even
| had to read the article to know that (tbf maybe I'm part of the
| problem)
| 7777777phil wrote:
| Related threads on overwhelmingly negative comments: -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40430263 -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32400521
| ok123456 wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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
| 7777777phil wrote:
| 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.
| osakasake wrote:
| 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.
| 7777777phil wrote:
| Thanks for the pushback this is exactly the kind of peer
| review I was hoping for at the preprint stage. You are
| likely correct regarding the sampling bias. While the
| intent was to capture all. posts, an average score of 35
| suggests that my archiver missed a significant portion of
| the zero-vote posts (likely due to my workers API rate
| limits or churn during high-volume periods). This created a
| survivorship bias toward popular posts in the current
| dataset, which I will explicitly address and correct.
|
| To clarify on the second point: I am not analyzing
| individual comment scores (which, as you noted, are
| hidden). The metric refers to post points relative to
| comment growth/volume. I will be updating the methodology
| section to reflect these limitations. The full code and
| dataset will be open-sourced with the final publication so
| the sampling can be fully audited. Appreciate the rigor.
| osakasake wrote:
| If you want some more feedback, why are you using
| Cloudflare workers that presumably cost you money? You
| can retrieve all of the HN content with a regular PC
| pretty easily. I'm talking a single core with a python
| program and minimal RAM.
| 7777777phil wrote:
| You're right that a simple Python script would be more
| cost-effective for this kind of archiving. I went with
| workers because I was already familiar with the stack and
| wanted real-time processing, but for a research project
| focused on completeness rather than latency, your
| approach makes much more sense - please reach out if you
| want to offer your help. Initially I was planning on
| building a public realtime dashboard and might as well
| still do.
| ferfumarma wrote:
| Interestingly, this is the kind of negative feedback that
| your post implies is bad. Thank goodness for negative
| feedback!
| 7777777phil wrote:
| self-fulfilling prophecy
| nomel wrote:
| > that your post implies is bad.
|
| Where does this come from? Please quote where he said
| "negative" means "bad".
| pjc50 wrote:
| > "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..
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| Kye wrote:
| For example: my #2 submission
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38468326
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| 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?
| analog8374 wrote:
| Everybody likes a horror movie.
| MeteorMarc wrote:
| Is this positive or negative news?
| shikon7 wrote:
| If I would guess, I'd say 65% positive, 35% negative
| tbrake wrote:
| HN is a beautiful lesson on the hard limits of a contrarian's
| usefulness.
| mdoliwa wrote:
| I wonder how HN front page would look like with positive ones
| only.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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-chan wrote:
| People usually complain when they are not happy but do not praise
| when they are. It's unsurprising most comments are negative.
| psychoslave wrote:
| 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.
| yomismoaqui wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| ESL?
| BrawnyBadger53 wrote:
| English second language
| andruby wrote:
| "English as a Second Language" would be my guess, but I've
| never seen that used as an abbreviation
| the__alchemist wrote:
| It's what they call (called?) the school programs in USA.
| squigz wrote:
| We have that in Canada too
| detaro wrote:
| It's a very common abbreviation for that
| c-linkage wrote:
| English for Speakers of other Languages
| gilrain wrote:
| You're likely thinking of TESOL, Teaching English to
| Speakers of Other Languages. ESL is English as a Second
| Language.
| yomismoaqui wrote:
| Sorry, edited for clarity.
|
| PS: I learned that acronym less than a year ago, so maybe it
| is not as used as I thought.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| It's pretty common, but I guess just for English people (or
| maybe just in Canada as hinted in another post?)? Either
| way I'm all for eliminating acronyms in public posts!
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| It's common and wrong. I had to do "ESL" courses at a
| Canadian secondary school, even though English is my
| third language, not second.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| Ha, technically correct but also a little nitty. "First"
| and "second" are colloquial used here as "main" and
| "other." But again, you're not wrong.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Even if we were to admit that "first" meant "main" and
| "second" meant "other," it would still be wrong, because
| it is possible for your first language to no longer be
| your main language, which is the case for me.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| Right. Again, it's colloquial. These things happen in
| languages.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| I know, just felt like being nitpicky :)
| sodapopcan wrote:
| All good :D
| neilv wrote:
| Is this thread just toying with the metrics?
| neutronicus wrote:
| "Subsequent Language"? "Successor Language"? "Secondary
| Language"?
|
| Feel like there is an "S" word that works
| DavidWoof wrote:
| It's very common the US as well, but primarily in
| education circles. I honestly have no idea what percent
| of the general public would recognize it immediately
| (hard to know for anything, really).
| c-linkage wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm running Firefox 146.0.1 (aarch64) on MacOS and don't have
| this issue.
| 7777777phil wrote:
| 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-linkage wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-linkage wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| skerit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| Salty but not mean is how I put it
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| 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.
| tux3 wrote:
| Technically speaking, it's not a reflection, it's Rayleigh
| scattering. So you're wrong, even the majority of the time!
| :)
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Exactly; but rarely is this done for curiosity or
| accuracy; but instead for veiling toxicity.
|
| This place drowns in veiled toxicity.
|
| "Grass is green"
|
| "But I live in California and we have a drought, and the
| entire concept of green grass is a waste of valuable
| water resources, and was frankly always a sign of
| privilege because only someone with excess freshwater can
| do it, and we need that freshwater for starving kids in
| Africa, and if Boomers hadn't been so obsessed with
| single family housing and urban sprawl..."
| acessoproibido wrote:
| >drowns in veiled toxicity
|
| I don't really disagree but given the massive tsunami of
| outright _vileness_ that has engulfed all other online
| soaces it's holding up remarkably well
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| This remains the best general description imo:
|
| > The site's now characteristic tone of performative
| erudition--hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian,
| authoritative--often masks a deeper recklessness. Ill-
| advised citations proliferate; thought experiments abound;
| humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational.
| Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral
| positions. The most admired arguments are made with data,
| but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data
| tend to be ancillary concerns.
|
| From the new yorker's profile of dang a few years ago. It
| doesn't specifically address the negativity but it contains
| it, if you get what I mean.
|
| Also I mean you know you, personally, are one of the worst
| about this right? I only recognize a handful of usernames
| here and yours is one for exactly this reason.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| I recognize your name very well for the exact same
| reason, touche.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Do you consider yourself an ideologue, an honest
| propagandist? I do for myself, I don't profess any
| particular devotion to these ideals of rhetoric or
| debate. I just consider them tools to accomplish goals,
| that may be laid aside at will or need. I think frankly
| most people here also do they just don't admit it.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| It really bums me out that you're apparently still rate-
| limited, I always appreciate a giraffe-lady thread.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I simply choose to believe that people do this out of a
| place of genuine curiosity / excitement to share knowledge.
| I believe this approach of assuming the best of intentions
| is even in the HN guidelines! Or maybe it was just the old
| Reddit ones from long long ago when Reddit was more like
| what HN is now. Either way, maintaining the background
| assumption, even when it is challenging to do so, makes HN
| a far more pleasant place to inhabit.
| acessoproibido wrote:
| Compared to how bad online discourse has gotten pretty much
| anywhere else in the meantime, it's still really good here.
| Only place I can stomach for extended periods
| cheschire wrote:
| So you're arguing that technically the technical critique
| is not valuable by yourself arguing on technicalities of
| the technical critique. Oh the irony! But you're not wrong.
| ;)
| mrweasel wrote:
| I do run into the overly pedantic stuff pretty frequently,
| people will often latch on to some minor point or detail,
| maybe because it's easier to comment on?
|
| Deep technical critique often can't be in the comments, in
| my opinion. Unless you're an expert, setting up the
| environment, doing the experiments and presenting the data
| is an entire article on it's own. It would probably be
| healthier if people did that, rather than typing out a
| quick comment.
|
| Then there are topics like how AI will influence society in
| general, that's a multi-year sociology study, before being
| able to say anything with just a hint of accuracy. Warnings
| based on sentiment and anecdotes will always register as
| negative.
|
| There are some articles that have 200+ comments, in those
| cases whatever you have to say has probably already been
| posted, but people like to vent their frustrations,
| sometimes it helps to type out your thoughts, even if no
| one will read them.
| 7777777phil wrote:
| The classifiers I used are definitely conflating technical
| criticism with genuine negativity, and that's a real
| limitation. When I say "technical critique reads
| differently than personal attacks," I probably should have
| been clearer that the models aren't making that distinction
| well.
| stuartjohnson12 wrote:
| This is SUCH a good example of pedantry and will become my
| new primary example. All too often, people think of
| pedantry as being along the magnitude of scale. The
| "rational" pedant's response to this is to use quantitative
| jargon and bayes to scale up the size of the nitpick.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Less toxic than Twitter and clones for sure.
| taeric wrote:
| Exactly the kind of standard I love to hold myself to. :D
| rmoriz wrote:
| It's worthwhile to mention ,,clones" because
| Mastodon/Fediverse and bsky turned into the same negativity
| sinkholes just with a different group. Builders and
| creators quickly became the minority, as it happend on
| Twitter within 3-4 years after launch.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I'll grant that.
|
| I am active on Mastodon, Bluesky, and Tumblr but not X.
| On all of those platforms I am selective about who I
| follow (e.g. said anything about Trump in the last 20
| posts I won't follow you, posted an image with angry text
| in it, I won't follow you) and quick with the block
| button. In the case of the first two I get a feed which
| is really cozy, the third has way too much AI slop (fake
| cat videos!) which would get the smackdown on the other
| too.
|
| I really enjoy sharing photos on that kind of platform as
| well as the kind of links I post to HN. I did have an
| image that was a breakout hit the other day which got me
| a burst of follows and it was really depressing that
| 95%-ish of those new followers are people who are
| apoplectic about #uspol. There are just so many of those
| people and they post so much and they always say the same
| things and I find it emotionally contagious.
|
| I am bothered less by the right wing equivalent of those
| people because I don't go on X, I live in one of the most
| liberal towns in America. They bother me less because I
| can easily dismiss the people who are bleating "free
| speech", "free speech", "freespeech" as NPC minions of
| Peter Thiel [1] whereas I agree with the followers of
| Heather Cox Richardson about the problem but think their
| solution is so wrong and actually destructive to their
| cause that they are effectively working for the Koch
| Organization for free and for me that stings.
|
| [1] ... although I know I shouldn't.
| rmoriz wrote:
| 1. Follow people who deliver. Deliver code, arts,
| thoughts, ideas, change.
|
| 2. Ignore the cultists of all sides, ignore the people
| who fall into every rage bait trap or just want to start
| a cult. Almost nobody is right or wrong all the time
| except people who outright hate all people and have no
| empathy.
|
| 3. Even when you follow a person, treat them with a big
| grain of salt. Everyone is an influencer, many have some
| underlying agenda or questionable views. Be reluctant to
| share, be reluctant of trusting in topics people are not
| known for. Your three letter guy sure knows A LOT about
| code, business and getting things done, however his view
| on politics may be dubious. You need to be able to accept
| that both at the same time.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| 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.
| f1shy wrote:
| 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.
| worksonmine wrote:
| There's a reason those kinds of posts are considered off-
| topic here. Polarized subjects quickly get ugly and toxic,
| people tend to turn off their brains and just react rather
| than trying to understand the other perspective. It's a
| shame, I enjoy discussing those topics, especially with
| people I disagree with. But it's almost impossible on the
| internet.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| We could have positive discourse on polarized subjects,
| but the forum doesn't want that. We are artificially
| limited here in many ways. If the forum were changed, it
| could be a lot easier to direct conversations in a
| constructive way. But it's currently designed for mass-
| appeal and engagement.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >but the forum doesn't want that
|
| Who is the forum exactly?
|
| >But it's currently designed for mass-appeal and
| engagement.
|
| Are you talking about hacker news? Your description
| confuses me in relation to the site you are on.
|
| I'd like to see you expand on how one would remove the
| artificial limitations without massively increasing the
| administrative/moderative workload.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Yes I'm talking about HN.
|
| First of all, there are famously no real sub-sections of
| HN, it's just this one "home page" with 30 "stories" that
| are voted on by 5 million people (unique monthly
| viewers), and a couple other ways to sort or view the
| same stories based on some algorithm. So it's nearly
| impossible to have discussions here unless it falls into
| a very broad category. Therefore the discussions are
| broad, the opinions are broad, the reactions are broad.
| You have a lot of people talking past each other, arguing
| over nothing, reinforcing false beliefs, etc.
|
| Second, like Reddit and its other "story-specific
| discussion" brethren, there is no ongoing conversation,
| like older forums, so all discourse has to be topical,
| temporary, and based around a specific piece of media and
| set of positions. People get trapped in debates over
| false premises, presented bad information, and can't
| reference other discussions or pick up where one left
| off. There is no memory or continuous conversation, so
| every new story is nearly random in what will be
| discussed, what opinions will become dominant, what group
| rides in to take over the thread.
|
| Third, the site is filled with algorithms to filter,
| optimize, weight, and otherwise alter what content shows
| up on the front page. It is a highly curated, highly
| artificial environment, serving the purposes of YC to
| gather users with which to funnel potential founders into
| its startup machine. This is a business and we are the
| product, and we are being honed and shaped according to a
| very particular set of interests, priorities, goals. A
| sort of 'ideal world' according to a very small number of
| people.
|
| Fourth, there's as many moderators for all of HN as there
| is for the average Subreddit, yet 10x as many users here.
| It would be trivial to simply acquire more volunteer
| moderators. But I believe they want to keep tight control
| on moderation in order to ensure they shape narratives,
| behaviors and culture in a specific way.
|
| Fifth, the technology of the user interface hasn't
| advanced past what was available in the 90's. Besides the
| lack of topics/categories, tags, customization of the
| feed, and no way to provide feedback other than up/down
| vote. This is intentional in order to force the culture
| YC wants. But it makes it difficult to have more nuanced
| discussions. For example, the "up/down" vote button could
| easily expand to more specific reactions, ala Slashdot's
| moderation modifiers (Troll, Flamebait, Offtopic,
| Redundant, Overrated, Underrated, Funny, Informative,
| Interesting, Insightful, Normal). Going further, votes
| could have emotional modifiers (Angry, Scared, Confused,
| Excited) and intellectual modifiers (Incorrect,
| Misleading, Stupid, Correct, Factual, Agreed). The
| addition of this intellectual and emotional context would
| allow users to provide more feedback to the comments
| they're voting on, which helps guide users in their
| discourse as well as shape the culture towards more
| intelligent discourse. But without these signals, there
| is no way to divine what an upvote or downvote means, so
| it becomes an incredibly poor signal. The only way to
| know if a story is a shit-show or not is to compare total
| upvotes to total comments, as a majority of comments
| indicates a lot of emotional, uneducated people trying to
| force their opinion on everyone else.
|
| This could be improved if those people could provide more
| context to their feedback, or the discussion continued
| past the initial story in a more nuanced way. But there
| is no way to solve this as every single story is another
| battle that everyone feels like they have to fight over
| again, because ground is never won, nuance never
| captured, education impossible. This forum is designed to
| force people to come back to reassert whatever they
| already believe, or argue to perpetuate it, which keeps
| engagement high.
| f1shy wrote:
| Not so off topic. About 2 weeks ago, I commented in such
| an article saying I humbly don't think is an appropriate
| topic for HN, and I was downvoted to hell in a hurry...
| vpribish wrote:
| most of your comments start by objecting to the person
| you reply to - that sets most people on edge and they are
| likely punishing you for your tone as much as the content
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I find the most emotionally negative content on HN is about
| public education. There are so many people who were
| personally affected by poor schooling in their youth and
| cannot resist to add their (usually unhelpful and
| uninsightful) two cents to the discussion. So many of these
| negative comments are paint with a very broad brush, like:
| "Public schools are terrible in state X." It is so general
| as to be useless.
|
| Years ago, when I was young, I noticed a trend watching
| local TV news: Whenever they would interview people on the
| street, past a certain age, their comments become so much
| more negative. Example: "So, how is traffic in your part of
| town? Oh, it's never been worse." "How are the public
| schools? Oh, it's never been worse." Ad nauseam. Whenever I
| feel any conversation in my life is drifting into "Oh, it's
| never been worse.", I tune out.
| mstipetic wrote:
| There's a lot of pedantry as well
| cloverich wrote:
| It bugs me but also it comes with the territory - HN
| attracts an awful lot of programmers, and most programmers
| skew hard to pedantry (more specifically, noticing and
| correcting minute details). I'd love the exact same
| community minus the pedantry, but if losing the pedantry
| costs the programmers, but am not sure how possible that is
| (without more sophisticated moderation).
| mbesto wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| GypsyKing716 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Add in that optimists live longer.
| lazide wrote:
| 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!
| pfdietz wrote:
| That sounds like survivor bias.
|
| It's very important to filter out bad ideas.
| alephnerd wrote:
| It is important to filter ideas, but being reflexively
| negative like a _large_ portion of HN is just isn 't
| productive. To quote my manager from years ago back when I
| was still an IC - "I know there are problems - tell me
| solutions". The whole point of _constructive_ criticism is
| to start a dialogue in good faith.
|
| To be frank, a large portion of HNers just aren't qualified
| for that and never will be, and a growing proportion
| exhibit bot-like behavior. The fact that a bot account for
| "The Register" operated undetected on HN for 3 years and
| accumulated 66k karma until I and one other commenter
| decided to call it out highlights issues with this
| community.
|
| I personally think stricter moderation of tone (maybe in an
| automated manner), a stricter delineation on the kinds of
| topics being posted to HN, and a complete overhaul of the
| now 17 year old HN guidelines is now in order.
|
| HN used to be a platform where ICs and decisionmakers could
| anonymously have a water cooler conversation or a
| discussion but leave with changed impression. Over the past
| few years, it has exhibited hallmarks of becoming a more
| combative forum with users exhibiting Reddit-like behavior
| and oftentimes sharing articles from a handful of Reddit
| subs. Without a significant revamp, HN will lose it's
| signal-to-noise ratio which differentiated it.
|
| Already, most YC founders prefer to use BookFace over HN
| and more experienced technical ICs are looking to lobsters.
| pfdietz wrote:
| You disparage the negativity as "reflexive", but isn't
| whether the negativity is warranted more important than
| the pace at which it is delivered, or some oblique
| critique of its motivation? This looks like an attempt to
| smear the negativity. Your critique as HNers as not being
| qualified also looks like an ad hominem argument.
|
| Pace could be driven by the rapidity with which posts
| fall off the front page or with which comments expand so
| new comments are far down the list.
|
| I'd turn that around and say the observation that
| negative comments are upvoted shows that HN readers value
| them.
|
| I'll admit we could use more steelmanning when
| critiquing.
| lawn wrote:
| It's also important to not filter out the wrong ideas.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| moralestapia wrote:
| 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 ;).
| 7777777phil wrote:
| 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.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Okay, I'll reach out.
|
| Btw, excellent work!
| igleria wrote:
| Anger sells... but who's buying?
| joshstrange wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| joshstrange wrote:
| 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.
| Teever wrote:
| 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.
| heliumtera wrote:
| >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.
| joshstrange wrote:
| 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
| heliumtera wrote:
| I was not suggesting that quality is inversely proportional
| to effort, but that could be true on this heterogeneous
| medium. Targeting a spread audience requires
| disproportional effort to soften ideas and not offend and
| put off. Done right, the "good" content will be polished
| and blend in, not getting noticed. While superficial this
| is obvious, designing content to be positive is designing
| it to be invisible. I don't think this applies to a blog
| because the audience was designed, whoever found the
| content already has a good number of characteristics you
| can assume. Incentives on hacker news are very pervasive
| and it is designed, literally, to relay a particular kind
| of narrative: more power to the middle man, if the middle
| man is backed by the good guys.
|
| Ty for the blog reference, will check it for sure.
| r-johnv wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| joshstrange wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| > 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| > 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.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| 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.
| bell-cot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Everyone likes a good sneer. Makes us feel better.
| tomasphan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You're right! Oh, wait....
| jackp96 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The site design also seems to discourage making a simple
| positive comment. Just click the up vote button.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| nashashmi wrote:
| 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).
| lurk2 wrote:
| 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.
| lazarus01 wrote:
| 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
| 7777777phil wrote:
| Thanks! And appreciate you sharing the Harris clip. I sometimes
| listen to his meditations:
| https://philippdubach.com/posts/gratitude
| lazarus01 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This is such a boring post to be #1 on Hacker News.
| Herring wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Including this one.
| nashashmi wrote:
| 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-og wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| 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.
| squeefers wrote:
| > 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.
|
| harm??? so only happy thoughts from now on?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I cut people a lot slack that might be dealing with a lot
| of negative issues in their head. If they want to drop
| out and spend the next year hiking the Pacific Crest
| Trail, cut off from the _outside_ world, I 'm going to
| respect their choices.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Negative emotions take their toll, too much will age you
| prematurely. It's not a black and white thing of course,
| there's a balance to be struck.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I generally agree. Offline (ask my family) I'm Pollyanna.
|
| It's hard to let bad ideas go unchallenged though. Places
| like Reddit? Sure, brigades, bots--it's tilting at
| windmills to try to add balance there. But HN is a
| community I still care for. I still respect the comments
| (and commenters) here.
|
| (No, _commentator_ is not a word--despite what Apple 's
| dictionary is telling me.)
| Y_Y wrote:
| What do you call the people who provide _commentary_ on
| e.g. live sports? Oddly we don 't use that word for
| people who leave internet comments, but it seems like it
| would fit pretty well.
|
| (See also: _commentariat_ )
| pfdietz wrote:
| I disagree. Life is a tightrope of limited duration and
| small missteps can be disastrous. Take risks, but tilt the
| odds in your favor by making the optimism as pruned by
| correct negativity as possible. Do not waste time
| optimistically on something that has little chance of
| success, or that has already demonstrably failed. Above
| all, do not get trapped wishfully believing in things that
| are wrong.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >It's probably not a good approach to life though.
|
| It is 100% how adults approach life.
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3652533/
|
| >Most bad ideas aren't really worth arguing about,
|
| At the same time you have to stop bad ideas in their tracks
| otherwise they spread like bacteria on an unclean counter,
| and the internet typically does a bad job of stopping them
| unless moderation is heavy handed. This leads to a never
| ending circle of discussion of bad ideas.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Won't lie, I haven't read that paper, but I doubt it
| contradicts what I'm saying, which is that it is
| unhealthy to be stressed, and arguing with randos on the
| internet about shit that doesn't matter most of the time
| (and which both of you are almost always powerless to do
| anything about) is going to have a negative effect on
| your long term health outcome. Every minute that you
| spend annoyed about reddit user ballLicker6969 saying
| something ignorant is a minute of your life you'll never
| get back.
| goatlover wrote:
| Bad ideas in politics should be argued about, particularly
| if they are gaining traction and have backing, because then
| there's a decent chance they will become policy. People who
| tune out of politics because of polarization and toxicity
| are letting the bad ideas win.
|
| Bad ideas in fields of expertise need to be discussed to
| the extent of keeping the field free of bad ideas as much
| as possible. Biologists will sometimes point out why
| intelligent design is not a good scientific theory for
| example.
| perfmode wrote:
| 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.'
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I like your attitude.
| 112233 wrote:
| 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
| pfdietz wrote:
| I'm very confused by this analogy.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| Not the OP, but I'll try to unpack it for you.
|
| Reading online, listing to public discourse, etc. these
| days is like taking the Tide Pod challenge; people
| feeding you inedible or even toxic garbage that
| superficially looks like candy. If we fed others actual
| food with the same care we employ when producing "food
| for thought", we'd all be, at best, very, very ill.
|
| When compared with what people wrote in the past
| (especially through a survivorship bias filter, where the
| best writing is preserved longer and distributed more
| widely) what we produce today seems crude and disgusting.
| 112233 wrote:
| Thank you for putting it this eloquently.
|
| Even stranger, for me, is the current prevalence of
| collective shunning, the so called cancel-culture, that
| is triggered by the most diverse reasons, but seemingly
| never buy the negativity and toxicity of the discourse.
| It is always lone individuals leaving because of that.
| But as soon as another reason - political, cultural etc.
| -- is added, there is a collective exodus and
| condemnation. twitter/x is good example.
| nospice wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| nit: 35%
|
| I did something similar and ended up opening only
| /r/AskHistorian posts...
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| 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
| slfreference wrote:
| If you block /r/history, you would prove the aphorism, "One
| thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from
| history"
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| 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.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| 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.
| Teever wrote:
| An adjacent problem is when enthusiasts in hobby subreddits
| become a bit too enthusiastic about the hobby which
| sometimes develops into an unhealthy obsession that the
| community (un)wittingly becomes a part of.
|
| I recently bought a pair of boots from a reputable brand.
| So I of course checked out the subreddit for the brand and
| while many posts are good and the community is receptive to
| questions but posts by weirdos with like a dozen+ pairs of
| $300+ boots dominate the discussion.
|
| Can these people actually afford like $5000 worth of boots
| and all the accessories they come with it? Maybe. Maybe
| we're all participating in their shopping addiction when
| they post pictures of their stairs covered in boots.
|
| Either way there's something unsettlingly unnatural about
| their posts, and I don't mean in an astroturfing sort of
| way.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > Either way there's something unsettlingly unnatural
| about their posts, and I don't mean in an astroturfing
| sort of way
|
| the mentally ill are, well, mentally ill after all.
| josefresco wrote:
| 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-og wrote:
| 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.
| epolanski wrote:
| 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.
| rvnx wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| I don't think YC startups need to sneak to promote their
| startups - they can just ask the moderators to give them a
| boost.
|
| Meanwhile if you say anything bad about capitalism the
| comment is removed.
| rvnx wrote:
| I am genuinely none sure.
|
| I would tend to think that this goes naturally:
|
| you get boosted by a circle of people you know, and who
| wants you to succeed, because if you succeed they will
| get money), so there is the incentive in some way.
|
| but it's still plausible that getting a boost on HN is
| part of the package (but I am not sure it is needed,
| because of this natural push that you get from let's say
| 100 people around you).
|
| What you said about capitalism is true, I noticed it too,
| and it sounds even strange to me, as we are literally on
| a board that is initiated by a capitalist fund.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I've seen plenty of anti-Capitalism comments on HN. To be
| sure, not the popular opinion.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| One thing I've noticed over the decades here: anti-
| capitalism used to get you flagged to death in the
| past... but since Covid and _especially_ since the
| Russian invasion and associated price shocks / cost-of-
| living crisis, it takes a lot to even get downvoted.
|
| The HN culture used to be almost exclusively a ton of
| nerds thinking that tech and the free market would be the
| answer for everything - but the last few years have
| served as a brutal, but very effective reality check for
| a lot of people.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > last few years have served as a brutal, but very
| effective reality check for a lot of people.
|
| Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much of a good
| side to it all. Work from home maybe?
|
| It's back a ton of progress on many fronts. Counter
| examples welcomed.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > The HN culture used to be almost exclusively a ton of
| nerds thinking that tech and the free market would be the
| answer for everything - but the last few years have
| served as a brutal, but very effective reality check for
| a lot of people.
|
| IMO it's more the HN userbase has expanded, a lot, and
| now includes a lot of people who aren't the same tech
| enthusiasts the site had historically. Yeah, I know,
| eternal September and all that, but to put it into
| perspective: Trump's first election victory got 2215
| comments[0], his second election victory got 9275
| comments[1]. There are some mitigating factors here--iirc
| HN was having downtime issues due to the traffic in 2016
| --but HN was already pretty popular among tech
| enthusiasts 9 years ago, and it's grown 400% from that!
|
| I'm sure _some_ people have changed their minds, but any
| shifts (perceived or real) in politics on HN are more
| likely due to changes in the userbase over time, IMO.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907201
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42057647
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I'm sure some people have changed their minds, but any
| shifts (perceived or real) in politics on HN are more
| likely due to changes in the userbase over time, IMO.
|
| "Eternal September" explains (correctly IMHO) why there
| are more people of a different background, but more
| people doesn't explain why it is very noticeable that
| downvotes and deathflags don't happen as frequently as
| before.
| nosianu wrote:
| > _Meanwhile if you say anything bad about capitalism the
| comment is removed._
|
| If that is an example for how your usual comments look
| like, I can assure you it has nothing to do with whether
| you criticize capitalism or not. A low-effort single-
| sentence mood statement is just not a good fit for the
| site.
| zzzeek wrote:
| "you're posting too fast; please slow down"
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I believe the only threshold that might warrant karma-
| farming on HN is 100 points? Is that when you can actually
| downvote? After that karma was certainly not on my radar.
|
| I'm trying to establish, if you'll believe me, that I'm not
| whoring.
|
| And yet, I confess to generally towing the cynical line in
| my comments. But that's my nature. "Atta boy", piling on,
| bandwagoning--antithetical to my nature. In fact I'm always
| suspicious when a thing appears to have no downside.
|
| I can say too at times, I'll take a stand in opposition to
| what I actually believe in order to call myself out--or,
| you know, cast doubt. I suspect ego comes in to play too--
| it's kind of a challenge to take the unpopular opinion and
| champion it.
|
| In short, I think if I generally agree with the sentiment
| in the thread, I don't comment.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| I think it's 500 points, or at least it used to be.
| totallynotrvnx wrote:
| Just checked, 1 point can upvote but not downvote
|
| At the end, just saying that the best way to increase
| engagement is to increase bait / rage. Ironically that
| increases retention on the platforms too, so they don't
| need peace, if there are juicy flame wars.
| CDRdude wrote:
| It probably still is. I have a bit below 500 points and I
| can't downvote.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| (I just helped push you closer to the mark.)
| rvnx wrote:
| I like to defend the devil here as well, because I see it
| as an interesting challenge / puzzle. It is very
| intellectually motivating and difficult to find
| compelling arguments that can move someone's opinion.
| Like verbal judo.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| We might be called _contrarians_.
|
| I'm okay with that.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > These points have utility: the more points you have, the
| more credibility you have on this platform and capacity to
| push a story.
|
| <1: Troll
|
| <10: Throwaway
|
| <60: Troll
|
| <300: Probably a throwaway. Quality varies widely.
|
| >500, <1000: Normal people
|
| >1000, account less than 6 months old: Redditor, all
| content will be political or occasionally about Linux, most
| comments will be inflammatory.
|
| <1000, >10,000, account less than 5 years old: Mostly
| normal users. Quality isn't generally great.
|
| <10,000, >30,000, account 10+ years old: Usually the best
| quality posts; karma and age suggest consistent
| contributions overtime without any of the personality
| disorders that go with being terminally online.
|
| >100,000, account <5 years old: Redditor, all content will
| be political or occasionally about Linux, most comments
| will be inflammatory. Lots of flagged submissions about US
| politics.
|
| >100,000, 10+ years old: Domain knowledge expert. Usually
| an older user with enough of a reputation that a subset of
| users know the user's real identity. Will occasionally post
| absolutely unhinged comments.
| lostlogin wrote:
| This is hilarious, particularly the last sentence.
|
| The absolute key feature is the domain experts, not the
| karma. Any time any subject comes up, someone appears
| that knows everything about the subject and lives in the
| field. It's the single best thing about HN by a million
| miles.
| chasd00 wrote:
| The domain experts present here is pretty amazing i have
| to agree. I love when you get a comment that's like "oh,
| you have that wrong it's X instead of Y. I invented this
| technology 30 years ago, here's the reasoning behind
| X..."
| epolanski wrote:
| You can have millions of upvotes just with jokes.
|
| I remember a guy that had millions just because on any
| reddit AMA asked "tits or ass?"
| mjr00 wrote:
| The commentor was talking about HN karma, not reddit.
|
| You're right about reddit karma though. One of the good
| things about HN is that throwaway joke posts like that
| are downvoted/flagged/otherwise discouraged. I can guess
| the top comment for any given Reddit comment section with
| like 90% accuracy just because it's going to be the most
| obvious joke possible based on the submission title, and
| Reddit users love upvoting those for some reason.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| You can also have hundreds of thousands of downvotes if
| you work for EA and are completely tone deaf.
|
| https://fandomwire.com/karma-slapped-ea-with-the-most-
| downvo... (there are probably better articles about it
| out there, I quit reddit a long time ago)
| latexr wrote:
| > and there is practically no downsides if you upset anyone
|
| Seems like the downsides are about the same as in other
| forums. It depends on if your account is anonymous or not.
|
| > 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.
|
| I don't think that's right. You don't get points for
| replies, you get points for upvotes. And downvotes you get
| also affect your overall karma, though you don't seemingly
| have an upper bound on upvotes but I have read there is a
| lower bound of -4. An upvote on a submission seems to also
| be worth less than an upvote on a comment, though I'm not
| sure of the ratio (half? one third?).
|
| > 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.
|
| I don't think that's right either. Once you can downvote
| and flag (500 karma?), more points don't give you anything
| extra. Personally I rarely check someone's points, only
| when viewing comment history or trying to identify spammers
| and other obvious bad actors.
|
| > This is why I am collecting points on all my fake
| accounts, because once I have collected enough karma
| points, I can upvote my startup speech on Hackernews using
| these shadow accounts.
|
| HN has voting ring detection. Though I can't speak for how
| effective it is.
| slfreference wrote:
| There's a saying : No News is Good news.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Unfortunately "No News" doesn't make for a very good
| website.
| redserk wrote:
| 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.
| epolanski wrote:
| There's a lot of scientific evidence that negative and
| controversial content has multiple psychological effects of
| high emotional arousal, triggers the confrontation effect
| and toxicity breeds retention.
|
| We're more likely to keep arguing here when disagreeing
| than to agree and add much.
|
| And again, this isn't limited to internet but irl too.
| redserk wrote:
| It depends how you want to measure engagement and
| activity. Quality of discussion is something to consider.
| It's very difficult to have a proper discussion when all
| of the responses are the same expected replies to low-
| effort ragebait.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >I'm in communities where the more active discussions
|
| And they are heavily moderated against negative
| discussion/ragebait.
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3652533/
|
| >specifically, across an array of psychological situations
| and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the
| propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative
| information far more than positive information.
|
| This is a human problem and it happens everywhere.
| redserk wrote:
| How can you know the moderation style of the spaces I
| visit, when I haven't even linked them here?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Because you exist on the planet Earth with humans.
|
| For any forum to remain positive the following occurs.
|
| 1. the forum population is tiny and self controlling.
|
| 2. There is a lot of moderation to keep it from turning
| into a burning garbage dump.
|
| 3. There are no other choices, the above two is all that
| exist.
| redserk wrote:
| Again, how can you make these assertions without even
| knowing what these communities are?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Are your communities non-human?
| redserk wrote:
| Yes.
| nospice wrote:
| > And they are heavily moderated against negative
| discussion/ragebait.
|
| So? You have to do that because it takes one toxic person
| to poison the well. HN is aggressively moderated to get
| rid of articles and opinions that don't belong too.
| Without it, it would be just a constant stream of self-
| promotion and politics.
|
| The point is that in certain other places, someone (the
| moderators) worked to nourish a positive culture and it
| worked. HN didn't and it shows. I don't think that
| negativity is necessary to keep the forum interesting.
| Especially given that HN's negativity really isn't all
| that insightful. A lot of negative takes are _bad_ , and
| many of them are written without reading the article, or
| by cherrypicking a single sentence and attacking that.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >HN didn't and it shows
|
| You don't get tech without negativity. And honestly HN is
| very tame compared to most forums when it comes to the
| deeply negative.
|
| The problem with maintaining (only) positivity in tech is
| you turn into $large_companies marketing department. We
| have to step up and say security flaws exist. That
| companies outright lie. That some idea (when it comes to
| programming) are objectively bad.
|
| Hence why the OP is here on the thread talking about what
| negativity means in this particular case, because it also
| counts criticism.
| nospice wrote:
| > You don't get tech without negativity.
|
| This is something we tell ourselves to rationalize bad
| behavior. How come that 3D printing forums or woodworking
| forums or car maintenance forums can exist without
| toxicity, but tech somehow can't? There are people
| pushing products everywhere. You can ban marketing
| content or set ground rules for it.
|
| Further, performative cynicism really isn't that helpful.
| It's not insightful to hear that every company is evil
| and greedy, every personal project sucks, every
| scientific study is wrong, and every blogger is
| incompetent.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I'm a bit confused, you say that "HN is aggressively
| moderated" and in the next paragraph seem to imply that
| they don't do enough?
|
| If anyone wants to get a taste what an unmoderated HN
| would look like, check out /new and see how much garbage
| is submitted.
| nospice wrote:
| I'm saying it's aggressively moderated in some respects
| (off-topic content, politics, etc), but it's not
| moderated to root out a certain breed of snarky,
| I'm-smarter-than-you negativity. Many other forums police
| that second part and are doing just fine. This includes
| forums dedicated to technical hobbies.
|
| In fact, computer science, electrical engineering, and
| mathematics are pretty uniquely toxic and we keep
| rationalizing it.
|
| I remember working on a technical blog post for my
| company, trying to anticipate many of the possible HN
| rebukes and proactively address them as much as we could.
| And I remember having a conversation with a PR person who
| was genuinely taken aback by the hostility we've come to
| expect in our industry.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| cloverich wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-og wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| So a nice bubble? :) ( I actually mean that positive )
| wildzzz wrote:
| 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.
| skerit wrote:
| 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...)
| Tenemo wrote:
| I'm not the person you replied to, but yes, I've been using
| RiF since the API changes ...with a small 4-month l break
| last year when I was automatically flagged as bot API
| traffic and instantly permabanned with no warning. Reddit's
| built-in appeals went unanswered and ignored. Luckily I
| live in the EU, I appealed under DSA and they unbanned me
| after actual human review right before the 1-month
| deadline.
|
| Could have I created a new account instead? Maybe. Did I
| want to check if DSA actually works in practice and can get
| me back my u/Tenemo nickname that I use everywhere, not
| just on Reddit? I sure did! Turns out Reddit cannot legally
| ban me from their platform without a valid reason, no
| matter what is in the ToS. Pretty cool!
|
| Back to using RiF with a fresh API key after that and
| haven't had any issues since.
| phantom784 wrote:
| I switched to RedReader, which Reddit decided to still allow.
| bena wrote:
| 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_Y wrote:
| I feel ironically obliged to mention _Cunningham 's Law_
|
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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.
| mstipetic wrote:
| As someone who's on Reddit a lot, I completely agree
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I was chronically on reddit daily from when Digg collapsed
| until they pulled the API. I was long overdue to leave by
| that point anyway.
|
| Now in the last couple years, both my sisters have
| discovered reddit, and hanging out with them is like the
| god damn /r/all comments sections all over again. So
| insidious.
| scottyah wrote:
| I am very much in the same boat. I still browse every now
| and then, and now it feels like I can spot a redditor
| from two opinions/values in a conversation. It's
| definitely turned more mainstream and more
| indoctrinating. If Fox News turned our parents political,
| reddit is doing it to our generation.
| mstipetic wrote:
| I think often times they're not wrong but then again what
| do I do with this constant barrage of cynicism, can't
| change much anyway
| yodsanklai wrote:
| 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.
| hn_go_brrrrr wrote:
| I don't use Blind often, but whenever I do I always feel
| better about my job afterwards. Yeah, there are definitely
| parts about my job that suck, but at least it's not _that_
| bad.
| andersonpico wrote:
| 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.
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| Most people in the US begin life poor, and most of them are
| not poor forever. I wouldn't call this a "bleak future". I
| was definitely poor when I was 18, but I wasn't
| pessimistic. Pessimism at such a young age is almost always
| a mistake.
| lukan wrote:
| "Pessimism at such a young age is almost always a
| mistake."
|
| Is pessimism a consciouss choice?
| hn_go_brrrrr wrote:
| You can develop pessimism without a conscious choice, but
| once you become aware of how negative your outlook is,
| it's a conscious choice to not try to do better.
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| Being pessimistic about pessimism is individual-damaging
| and socially ruinous.
|
| One can develop pessimism about pessimism without a
| conscious choice, but once you become aware of how
| negative your outlook on pessimism is, it's a conscious
| choice to not try to figure out the different meanings of
| that word and how important it is for the proper
| functioning of democracy.
|
| Maybe read Orwell for a glimpse of mandatory optimism:
|
| "The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one...
| Winston turned round abruptly. _He had set his features
| into the expression of quiet optimism which it was
| advisable to wear when facing the telescreen._
| artur_makly wrote:
| with some it's an celebrated lifestyle:
| https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPCJpclgW04/
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| Indeed most choices we think we "make" are unconscious
| choices due to our environment. That does not mean we
| cannot introspect and learn and consciously change them.
|
| I am much more pessimistic generally than I was 20 years
| ago. But that's something I work on, not something I
| accept passively as a fact of life.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Yes. It is mostly because of environment, and you can
| change your environment.
| overfeed wrote:
| > Most people in the US begin life poor, and most of them
| are not poor forever
|
| Thank heavens young Americans can look forward to a
| $63k/year median income when they are employed full-time.
| lbrito wrote:
| Social mobility is decreasing since the 1980s. This is
| increasingly closer to not being true anymore.
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| Yes it has decreased from an amazingly high level to only
| a reasonably good level compared to most of the world's
| population.
|
| This is no reason for abject pessimism at 18 years old.
| lbrito wrote:
| I'd like to challenge that. Historical comparisons aside,
| looking just at today, if you're saying that social
| mobility is very good in the USA compared to most of the
| world, what are you basing that claim on?
|
| I would think something like Gini combined with HDI and
| GDP per capita, on which the US only fares well on the
| latter. I found out there is something called Global
| Social Mobility Index, done by the WEF, and it places the
| US in 27th.
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| I'm basing on my assumption vast majority of the world's
| people would love to be 27th.
|
| And this is borne out in emigration patterns and visa
| applications...
|
| It feels like we expect to be #1 in every category and
| we're unable to recognize that the US has it pretty damn
| good in a lot of important ways. Envy is the thief of
| happiness.
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| Also looking a bit more at the GSMI: a lot of those
| criteria are based on current social welfare benefits
| received by the population. Many of which programs are
| not sustainable in the long run.
|
| Of course the US has less of a social safety net than
| Norway, a petrostate with trillions of dollars in a
| national oil endowment, and ~half of their GDP is from
| fossil fuels. I don't know that I'd want to move to
| Norway for the kind of "social mobility" that I'm after.
| layer8 wrote:
| Or maybe it's just
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism.
| wavemode wrote:
| The subtext is that most Redditors have significantly
| better lives than 90% of people on Earth.
|
| Life is bleak if you perceive it to be bleak.
| fwip wrote:
| It depends on how you measure quality of life.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I can't afford the yacht lifestyle enjoyed by Jeff Bezos,
| so my life is ruined. #EatTheRich
| goatlover wrote:
| More like the super rich have huge influence over
| politics and can buy media companies to push their
| preferred narrative. Elon being the most visible example.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| Who at this point trusts any media anymore?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I'm not a member of the richest most powerful group of
| people ever, and my government falls far short of the
| ideal I envision, therefore I cannot possibly enjoy my
| life.
| fwip wrote:
| See, that's just using the same measuring rod. If you
| measure quality of life by income, yes, even poor
| Americans live good lives compared to the rest of the
| world.
|
| There are many other factors you could evaluate it on,
| though, and many of them are harder to quantify. Stuff
| like personal agency, status, leisure time, social life,
| community cohesion, etc.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Who in the world has it worst? I want to make sure I
| listen to the right person.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| You act like this is an enigma. Let's start with people
| without college degrees and no family history of college
| degrees.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Surely there are people who have it worse than that, no?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| It isn't necessary to identify the world's most
| unfortunate person to recognize that most redditors have
| privileged lives, yet choose to wallow in misery.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I just choose to not let what redditors do bother me.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| To wit, the vast majority of them have:
|
| - easy access to clean water
|
| - sufficient calories
|
| - safe shelter
|
| - education (presumably they can read and write if
| they're on Reddit)
|
| - internet access
|
| - free time (can't be writing nasty comments on Reddit if
| you're swinging a pick axe in a coal mine)
|
| Many of these things can't be claimed by millions in the
| world.
|
| And yet, it's one of the most cynical, negative places on
| the internet.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| This is not the 1950s. Most American's have internet,
| where they can see average people living lives around the
| world. Their houses may be a bit worse, but their cars
| are normally newer, they have internet, they have FAMILY.
| They have vibrant COMMUNITY. They have free time.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| You mean most Redditors live in a country with a higher
| GDP than 90% of people on Earth. That doesn't necessarily
| translate into 'significantly better lives', especially
| in a country with wealth gaps such as the USA has.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiymTzsZfoA
| patcon wrote:
| > like it or not that's far more anchored in reality than
| anything around these parts
|
| TRUTH.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| I don't think Reddit is representative of poor people. It
| skews educated and white collar.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| There were a lot more reasons for a positive outlook for
| the world 25 years ago. It significantly predates Trumpism.
| Some people see 9/11 as the turning point.
| metanonsense wrote:
| 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.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The assholes on reddit aren't the problem, often they are
| the people who are closest to breaking free from the swamp
| (yes, some are just assholes).
|
| The problem reddit has is the _celebration_ of it 's
| doomerism, even in the small hobby subs the vibe is still
| present. The highest upvoted comments are so nauseatingly
| repetitive and formulaic, ridden with whatever the
| contemporary dogma of reddit is, substantiated by snowballs
| of echo-chamber fallacy with pebbles of truth in the
| middle.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Consider /r/BuyItForLife ... nothing close to what you're
| describing. If you want a different experience, you need
| to be more selective.
| andrepd wrote:
| Why would young people with dismal economic perspectives and
| a poisoned political system possibly be miserable? That
| doesn't take too much to understand.
| ggrantrowberry wrote:
| They're miserable because they think this way. They think
| this way because they spend time with others spreading
| cynicism. Dismal economic perspectives and a poisoned
| political system is a point of view and a talking point and
| in reality not true for most people. If you know even a
| little bit about history you likely won't have this
| perspective. Get off social media and look around at real
| life and you'll see all sorts of great things!
| andrepd wrote:
| I don't use algorithmic social media and I'm looking at
| dozens of history books in my shelf as I type this. I can
| do without the patronising tone, thanks very much.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Then you'd at least be aware of the standard of living
| even the poorest among us enjoy compared to someone in
| say manchuria or eastern europe in 1941. The irony of the
| grandchildren and great grand children of actual
| holocaust survivors claiming the world today is simply
| too screwed up to bring kids into is astounding.
| foldr wrote:
| Realistically, we know that no-one's level of happiness
| here in the present is determined by standards of living
| in Manchuria in 1941. You can argue the point
| intellectually that we are all very well off compared to
| most humans who have ever lived. Nonetheless,
| psychologically speaking, people's satisfaction in life
| is determined by more local comparisons. (If new
| historical research showed that Manchurians in the 1940s
| were actually having a whale of a time, would that make
| you correspondingly miserable? Of course not!)
| andrepd wrote:
| > claiming the world today is simply too screwed up to
| bring kids into is astounding.
|
| But that's not what I'm saying, so there's that.
|
| Anyway, everybody (barring the global ultra-poor) is
| obviously aware that their standard of living is much
| higher than that of most of history. This is not novel,
| not hard to realise, and certainly not a discussion-
| terminating point.
|
| In the Western world every single generation since WWII
| has roughly speaking lived better than their parents. For
| people currently in their 20s, this is on track not to be
| the case. The "democratic normalcy" is under attack.
| Wealth inequality was reaching literal Gilded Age
| levels... and has now barreled past that with no sign of
| stopping. And yes, algorithmic social media running
| anger-maximisation machines on a planetary scale. Shall I
| go on? The point being that "medieval peasants didn't
| have microwaves" is immaterial to the discussion.
| goatlover wrote:
| Also climate change, which the world seems unwilling to
| take necessary action to mitigate. Are climatologists
| feeling good about the future?
|
| Young people protested Gaza, climate change, racism,
| massive wealth disparity and they just don't see the
| results. Governments, economic systems and societies just
| keep the status quo.
| brabel wrote:
| Young people are always the ones protesting against
| whatever they consider the currently big injustices. They
| rarely achieve something, but I think it's great that
| they do anyway. It shapes their priorities and
| experiences. In just 20 years, they will be the ones
| governing and by that time they will have the chance to
| see whether they were right about whatever they wanted.
| Most likely they will learn that what looked like the end
| of the world back then turned out to be just another
| overblown issue which eventually sorted itself out. And
| they will go on to mostly perpetuate the status quo with
| just a few changes that happen gradually, like the
| acceptance of LGBT and elimination of most institutional
| racism in my lifetime. When I was young we all thought
| that in the future , there would be too many people on
| the planet and not enough food for everyone. Job
| prospects were low due to tremendous competition as baby
| boomers made sure there had never been so many young
| people before. Some people believed pollution would get
| so bad that water would become as valuable as gold. This
| sounds ridiculous now but was dead serious back then.
| goatlover wrote:
| This assumes the world is still trending in a positive
| direction. I'm not convinced of that anymore. The
| scientific consensus is climate change will get worse and
| make things hard on human civilization. Doesn't need to
| be the worst case scenario. Looking at geopolitics, we
| see a rise in authoritarianism and a breakdown in the
| western liberal order since WW2. Also a rise in the
| popularity of the far right, and some of the gains for
| LGBT and against institutional racism are being reversed.
| Wealth disparity is also increasing, so is polarization.
| We can't know whether there is a global conflict around
| the corner. It happened twice before. There were many
| positive people in the roaring 20s.
|
| As for environment degradation in general, just because
| prior predictions were wrong doesn't mean the biosphere
| isn't still headed in the wrong direction for
| sustainability. Maybe we have the right governance and
| economics to adapt in time, but that's not a guarantee.
|
| Being positive about everything seems like a really
| privileged position. It also maintains the status quo. If
| you're Ukrainian, how positive would you feel about your
| country's future? How positive is Europe about NATO and
| it's future with the US right about now. How are
| Canadians feeling about their neighbor to the South? Are
| they confident future US elections will self-correct?
|
| Maybe over the long term it all works itself out and
| human progress continues to the stars or whatever. Or
| maybe we're going to be part of a Great Filter
| intelligent species face because of short sightedness and
| powerful technologies they unleash. Or maybe we'll just
| muddle along with some gains and then losses.
| Civilizations rise and fall, we really don't know how
| positive the future will be.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| There are always people convinced that everything is
| dire. When I was a teen the popular one was that working
| for any kind of future goal was pointless because there
| was going to be a nuclear war that destroyed humanity.
|
| There have always been wars and skirmishes around the
| world. Ukraine and Gaza are today's. There will be others
| tomorrow. Different tribes of humans just don't get
| along, never have.
|
| If you think the environment is bad now, you should have
| seen it in the 1970s. Chemicals dumped everywhere, rivers
| on fire, cities choked in smog.
|
| But the long term trend is always positive. Things are
| better now for more people than they ever have been.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I'll never forget one of my freshman "intro to
| engineering" courses in college the professor spent
| probably 15 min on the very first day going on about peak
| oil and how we were all doomed. He said this to a class
| full of kids enthusiastic about their future who want to
| build and make the world a better place. To this day, it
| was the single most toxic thing i've ever experienced and
| this was in the mid/late 1990's! If only one kid took his
| brain/soul poison to heart it would be a tragedy.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yeah peak oil. I remember books on the bestseller racks
| about that one.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I was amused when the Peak Oil site The Oil Drum shut
| down because of the dwindling number of contributors of
| "high quality content".
| goatlover wrote:
| There's a middle ground between doomerism apathy and
| optimistic status quo that problems aren't that bad so
| business as usual. People become pessimistic when they
| see societal structures that prevent actions dealing with
| serious problems. You don't have any justification or
| saying the long term trend is always positive. The future
| has many possibilities, not all good. The human past is a
| mixed bag. Trends are trends until they're not. Past
| wrong predictions are not guarantees those or similar
| predictions won't come true in the future.
|
| We really don't know that democracy will always prevail,
| that capitalism is sustainable in the long term, and that
| our current global civilization is immune to collapse. We
| don't know there will never be a nuclear war or that
| climate change won't hit the wrong tipping point. We
| don't know that humanity's future will continue to be
| better off indefinitely.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I agree, we don't know. But you can orient your life
| around the negative, find every excuse for why you are
| not succeeding or happy, spend too much time complaining
| about it all, and never make any progress. Or you can
| assume that things will work out eventually, pursue your
| goals, and probably end up in a better place.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| This is a repeating cycle however. The boomers where all
| hippies riding the wave of a future utopia where everyone
| is making art and dancing with each other all day. Screw
| the man, grass and love all day!
|
| Getting older what I have realized is that the enthusiasm
| of the youth is born from the lack of experience, lack of
| responsibility, lack of anything to lose, and a position
| to really only gain from any changes. When you are young
| you are largely a spectator to the game, and just like
| any other game, your views _will_ change when you become
| a player instead of an armchair expert.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| 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.
| snowram wrote:
| Country specific subs aren't better either. They slowly
| changed from comfy places to talk about laid back topics to
| a full on brigaded cesspool where only the most polarizing
| opinion thrive.
| Psillisp wrote:
| Reddit literally is what you make of it. Unlike HN.
| brightball wrote:
| Only if you create an account and start subscribing. If you
| just visit and browse you end up at all/popular which, when
| I still visited it was very predictable content any given
| day.
| 4k93n2 wrote:
| you can hide a fair bit with ublock origin, if you dont
| mind using old.reddit
| old.reddit.com##div[data-subreddit="politics"] old.
| reddit.com##.linkflairlabel[title="Politics"]:upward(.lin
| k) old.reddit.com##.link:has-text(/Trump|MAGA/i)
| old.reddit.com##.link:has(a[href*="foxnews.com"])
|
| although i have hundreds of these filters and its still
| not great, but its better than nothing
| andoando wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yeah you can pretty easily spot the chronically addicted
| redditor by their copy/paste standard rejoinders, memes,
| and cliches.
|
| Also, more and more of them are bots which are trained to
| regurgitate themes that get a lot of engagement.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| So should we stop being cynical and start writing "You're
| absolutely right!"
| worksonmine wrote:
| 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.
| GypsyKing716 wrote:
| Its called discourse, and its healthy.
| Epskampie wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Love a good rant or an artfully scathing review!
| taeric wrote:
| 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?
| 7777777phil wrote:
| Open to the Idea, how exactly would you classify "high energy
| posts" ?
| taeric wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| taeric wrote:
| If you two do get traction on this, would love to see it
| posted. Good luck!
| haritha-j wrote:
| Is a HN post complaining about negativity in HN, negative?
| beloch wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| well people doesn't just comment to say thanks or appreciation.
|
| Mostly people only comment when there's something _wrong_
| snowwrestler wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rmoriz wrote:
| 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.
| f1shy wrote:
| 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...
| 6thbit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| 6thbit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Hacker News is universally read by cynics and skeptics.
| Hopefully, that was negative enough.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Complete hogwash. I would never reflexively comment negatively on
| articles shared here before even opening them.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Now measure the performance of Hacker News posts about Hacker
| News posts.
| iambateman wrote:
| 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$$"
|
| Both are negative statements, but it doesn't make sense to group
| them together.
|
| Like...is this comment itself a "negative" comment? Maybe. But I
| want the author to improve and I think most people here do
| too...and that's where HN really shines.
| 7777777phil wrote:
| Yes, probably the core limitation of my analysis (see earlier
| comment). My classifiers are treating "I don't like React
| because I don't want to write HTML in my JavaScript" the same
| as "React sux a$$" 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!
| bennettnate5 wrote:
| I find it humoring that this article inadvertently contributes to
| its statistic
| mattmcknight wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The top comment here is as HN as it gets: "Yeah, but we are
| better than Reddit."
|
| Good job.
| ramon156 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Now let's check the comments and see when and by how much they
| have become negative.
| mellosouls wrote:
| _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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
|
| See also:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outrage_industrial_complex
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| The 2025 Oxford Word of the Year was _rage bait_
|
| https://corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-i...
| FpUser wrote:
| Captain obvious. That is why negative, controversial etc.
| material in newspapers sells more
| tgtweak wrote:
| controversy algorithm is real - reddit and twitter both
| prioritize controversial posts since they get people engaging.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| HN is where nerds come to complain with other nerds
| coffeecoders wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _> 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 wrote:
| 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?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| This makes me MAD AS HELL
| zipy124 wrote:
| 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).
| 7777777phil wrote:
| 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 m=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.
| zipy124 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 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.
| 7777777phil wrote:
| 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.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| 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...
| vpribish wrote:
| - "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.
| buttyuknow wrote:
| So the group synced a dumb bias. It must change. Not the
| author; they provided qualitative evidence that was not
| their intent. Update your opinion and perspective with that
| new evidence.
|
| Imo it's on the individual members of the groupthinkers to
| realize a math term (negatives are a thing in math) applied
| to mathematical data is not a qualitative attack on anyone;
| they must accept the groupthink has lost the plot.
|
| Consensus isn't always preferable. See religion.
|
| The context is obviously a mathematical analysis and math
| comes with negatives.
|
| If the critiques had actual substance to contribute to the
| world they wouldn't be so easily offended. Publishing low
| effort complaints that are little more than demands by far
| away randos to better to conform to their arbitrary
| standards is a laughable expectation. Internet randos can
| pound sand; they prop up nothing individually or
| collectively given most forums are a few thousand to tens
| of thousands of unique people with a platform but no real
| democratic power.
|
| Social media hyper-normalizing sentiment is just empowering
| social bullying by pressuring people doing the necessary
| work to think include the bike-shedding of non-
| contributors. Whole bunch of farm animals want to eat bread
| while letting the rooster do the work.
| bofadeez wrote:
| > Consensus isn't always preferable. See religion.
|
| Any examples where it's not preferable?
|
| Wisdom-of-Crowds coin-jar experiment: independent guesses
| are noisy, but their average reliably approximates the
| true count, showing group aggregation beats most
| individuals.
| nomel wrote:
| As a native born english speaker, I disagree completely.
| It's very obvious what he means. This is a _severe_ reading
| comprehension problem, not a problem with the author.
|
| > What counts as "negative" here? Criticism of technology,
| skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry
| practices, frustration with APIs.
| bofadeez wrote:
| Maybe version 2 will be better
| concinds wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| 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...
| 7777777phil wrote:
| 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!
| seizethecheese wrote:
| I linked to the model in my comment
| citizenpaul wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Exactly, critical thinking is framed as a negative sentiment in
| that analysis.
| vunderba wrote:
| _> 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.
| 7777777phil wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Cynicism is not a truth-telling philosophy, it cannot be.
| Telling you a fact is not being critical.
| rkagerer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What a load of nonsense.
| tokai wrote:
| Good. Should be higher. Positive comments are most often
| worthless.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Negative engagement should be a negative metric and bring
| negative karma to posters and commenters that take part in it.
| justinhj wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I wonder what the % is for stackoverflow
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This also explains how early performance can be predictive
| despite the lack of preferential attachment.
| ManBeardPc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Good things are nice, but they aren't interesting. They aren't a
| problem to solve.
| larodi wrote:
| Good ! Finally someone does it, sadly I didn't have the time been
| planning for 1 year now.
| scoofy wrote:
| _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"
| dang wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| neilv wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| Fair enough, I've edited out my references to age in the GP.
| It's not essential to the point.
| bilater wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This should be measured in regular intervals and plotted over a
| time axis. Just one sample doesn't say much.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| How much correlation is there between positive sentiment and
| blatant marketing?
| pengaru wrote:
| It should be higher
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The reason is easy to understand: HN commenters feel compelled to
| correct mistakes. The rage bait is real.
| websiteapi wrote:
| Why won't the people on this site let me hide the karma it shows
| under my username?!?!
| SilentM68 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2026-01-06 23:10 UTC)