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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If anyone wants to get a taste what an unmoderated HN would look like, check out /new and see how much garbage is submitted.
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.