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Comment by billmalarky | Hacker News Reader

Your last point speaks to me.

I've become a bit disillusioned with how negative HN seems to have become. Yes I'm well aware this has long been an issue (see: famous HN post from Drew Houston announcing DropBox), but it feels amplified these days. Maybe it's a sign of the times. There are certainly a lot of issues in todays world that seem to be increasing cynicism, but I'll see new tech posted on HN that is incredibly exciting only to see a bunch of comments tearing it to pieces over nit picks. It's like the community has lost ability to hold vision and have excitement for potential.

New creations are full of problems -- there hasn't been time to iron out the wrinkles -- but a lot of HN comments expect perfection from the get go and when they don't see it they rip the creation to shreds. It's demoralizing.

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I think a sceptical attitude towards technology is reasonable. Over the last few years overall we have seen a lot of snakeoil being peddled in the tech industry, a lot of over promises, and a lot of negative impact on society at large. So I think really scepticism is just a healthy response.

Because the central purpose of technology is to make things easier and simpler, not more complicated, every new piece of technology should have to justify itself. People who developed programming languages always understood this, new features need to have a real, significant purpose, or long term you have a big problem.

So I don't mind people being harsh or critical of new stuff. If what you have built is really useful (like Dropbox) it will survive and the critics will be proven wrong. It's tempting to sort of hype each other up and motivate each other but criticism has a more useful function even if some of it turns out to be wrong.

Well HN is more of an advertisement for YC companies and their products/services. It draws in people who are more likely to be their customers, people who love trying new stuff and thinking something new might be the solution they were looking for, people with a lot of cash to help try out such new solutions and get the ball rolling. That's why it's full of novelty in the posts and comments, and focuses its moderating energy on drawing in the best-of-the-best and the worldwide experts, because those at the forefront are often the very same who love novelty, and because they draw crowds of the same type. But it really is an advertisement machine first and foremost, and every single thing, from the posts to the comments, is meant to facilitate that.

>I think a sceptical [sp] attitude towards technology is reasonable

But HN has a skeptical attitude towards everything. HN, if we're being honest, stopped being a tech discussion forum a while ago. A user is free to ignore the multitude of other subjects that HN discusses in a day, and focus exclusively on the tech posts if they wish. But it's been my observation that a post about whatever political, economic, or historic subject will draw more mindshare per minute resident on the front page. And of course, posts will be largely negative. That's the nature of HN.

And, not only HN. I think this is the nature of most online discussion forums unfortunately. Before we can get to the point of comparing a healthy online forum with a non-healthy forum, we'd have to concede that it's difficult to find a healthy online forum at all. I'm not talking about online forums where all users are known to each other. Like the medical forums you find in use at certain healthcare delivery networks. You would expect such professional forums to be a bit more contemplative. I'm speaking of average, completely ungated online forum. In these environments, a healthy ecosystem will become more and more elusive with growth. Not really aware of any demonstrated working solution to that issue.

None of this is really the fault of HN, it's just the nature of user behavior in ungated online forums.

Being a sceptic is premiered amongst the hn crowd and tbh that's why I visit everyday. If I wanted optimistic half-truths I would keep consuming ad-run media.

The thing is, skepticism is often just pessimistic half-truths.

Seeing that Dropbox is one of only two YC companies to ever go public, they have never been profitable, and have said in their own filings they don't know when or if they will ever be profitable, the pessimism seems warranted.

Not to mention, it seems like Steve Jobs was right about DropBox. It's a feature not a product. For the same price you pay for DropBox, you can get the full Microsoft Office Suite plus 6TB of storage. The same with Google Drive and GSuite.

Dropbox announced they plan to be GAAP profitable by the end of this year: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/20/dropbox-dbx-earnings-q4-2019...

Ouch, pretty dismal take on Dropbox.

> they have never been profitable

Technically true, but mostly b/c of stock comp. Free cash flow positive for quite awhile:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DBX/dropbox/free-c...

Not exactly burning money. $1.2BN in cash holdings and growing, projected for an additional $1BN this year.

> have said in their own filings they don't know when or if they will ever be profitable

.. in 2017, and this is basically just boilerplate. Just about every company that goes public says this in their S-1 these days.

Now, 3 years later: https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/02/22/investors-cheer-dr...

In most communities, the more skeptical you sound the "smarter" people think you are. Optimism is native and therefore stupid.

Sadly that mentality has found its way here.

I agree with this. Some communities have taken this so far to be completely toxic (again, reddit). HN isn't that bad yet, but it's sad that people conflate cynicism with being "realistic" or "knowledgeable and worldly".

I've noticed this in the EU/US divide. Anything pessimistic in Europe is deemed smart and cool, and Americans are looked upon as native as dumb for their general optimism.

Then again Europeans also hate how much "moaning" goes on amongst themselves. Honestly it's easy to be down on everything all the time, try being an optimist these days. Not exactly easy.

It’s easy to find something to criticise, knowing what’s good about something or adding a constructive thought requires knowledge of the problem your product is trying to solve or the tech behind it. Fewer people have the latter.

In other words: pointing out a problem is easy. Finding a solution (and being able to actually get it done), much harder.

>but it feels amplified

But that's the thing isn't it? Does it feel amplified or is it actually amplified? Our misleading perceptions and biases may play a role (see: perpetual complaints about "young people these days", a common tendency to think things become worse with time).

A big factor is also the last decade was the gold rush days for many new digital platforms. Without going as far as claiming "everything that can be invented has already been invented", at least back then new app stores and web had lots of low hanging fruits with disruption capabilities and everything new naturally became cool and easy to talk positively about. Now the low hanging fruit have been plucked and what's left is either clones of existing services or exploiting your existing user base by harvesting whatever last bit left of their privacy. It's honestly harder to be impressed, and easier to be skeptical nowadays.

With that said, there are still many new super cool technologies, markets, articles, events and other insights on todays front page. Don't loose hope people.

> see: famous HN post from Drew Houston announcing DropBox

Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

The flip side is, if HN genuinely approves of your creation you can be confident you’ve done a great job.

Or that your creation appeals to one of HN's biases.

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