Comment by bargl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bargl | Hacker News Reader

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I took a stab at rewriting your comment so that it still got the point across but lost some of the tone that I felt was overly rude.

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This visualization, while technically impressive, could use a little work.

Comparing values is difficult because I can't see the relative growth between the boxes from year to year, or size of the budget as a whole. I don't quite see how the animation benefits the user, so you may want to scrap it for some sort of differential comparison. I also don't like the delay when I change from year to year. That could be optimized or reduced through the reduction of the animation time.

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Yeah, I know it's kind of snarky of me to correct your entire comment here, but I think our community (yeah I know I haven't had my account here long) is overly focused on criticizing. While all the content of your comment was awesome, it could have been stated in a more polite manner.

I'm not sure how to fix the attitude that crops up in developer communities, all I can think to do is point it out when people may be coming off in way they don't mean to. Which is probably the root cause for this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6353957

My intent was to be terse, not rude, and to give actionable feedback - not hidden in language and subtext. And anyway, language is supposed to have edge! I didn't want to say "this is sort of kind of less than optimal." I wanted to say "This is not good! You can do better! Here is how it can be improved!". If everyone just thought "meh" and said "well, that's pretty good. A+ for effort" - or worse, said nothing - people wouldn't improve. Non-actionable positive feedback is as harmful as non-actionable negative feedback.

Your correction (which I don't mind in and of itself) adds complexity and obscures the meaning of my statements. It says in 85 words what I said more clearly (and sharply) in 51. You add a white lie - "technically impressive" - to mask the true meaning of the point that is being made. And the tone is changed to reads as though you're talking to a child.

And - would a person whose second or third language was English more clearly understand your version or mine?

I agree that the community can be overly critical, but I don't think that this sort of criticism is the problem. The kind of criticism that is a problem is non-actionable criticism - insults to the person, or just "X already did this" or "nobody wants this".

I want terse, actionable feedback.

Also - "yeah I know I haven't had my account here long" are defense mechanisms, don't use them. You're a member of the community now, you get a voice like everyone else.

I agree that not everyone deserves a gold star but I tend to try the carrot over the stick in most instances. I do beat around the bush more than I should, and that's something I personally need to work on.

I realize that a lot of times terse can be better, and you modified your own comment better than I ever could. >"You can do better! Here is how it can be improved!"

That little bit of encouragement could be the support that changes the recipients reaction from "F-U man you don't know me" to "Wow, thanks for that criticism, I'll get on that." And you've only added 11 words.

High ranking HN comments tend to be negative, which leads me to feel like HN is not very supportive. This isn't the only metric, but having a good ratio of positive to negative feedback (assuming everything is equally actionable) is important. http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/03/the_ideal_praise-to-criticis...

>Also - "yeah I know I haven't had my account here long" are defense mechanisms, don't use them. You're a member of the community now, you get a voice like everyone else. Thank you, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5636314 this kind of thing has made me hesitant to use terms like "our community".

Please. Political Correctness does no one any good.

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