New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity | Hacker News Reader

New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

blog.ycombinator.com

1,248 pointssama631 comments

One of the most negative habits is in my opinion the failure to read a comment charitably (to make an effort to interpret it in the best possible light). Instead, people often tend to misread or miserunderstand what's being said, only to use the opportunity to write a "correction" based on that false impression. A worse flavor of the same problem is a misunderstanding that is then used to justify outrage or personal annoyance.

That's what I find worthy of being changed, and I will certainly make an effort to read comments more charitably as well.

Overall though, and I realize this is quite anecdotal, rampant negativity - especially about things other members of the community have created - seems to have gotten less common recently.

You are right. I read this somewhere, something along the lines ... that when you disagree with someone, you should first make sure to repeat and restate the arguments of the opponent you disagreeing with, in your own words, before making any of your own arguments.

I've never heard that before, but it's excellent advice. Sometimes I like to come up with the best argument I possibly can against my own beliefs (basically playing devil's advocate with myself) to better understand opposing viewpoints, but this is even better.

Here's one version, from Daniel Dennett:

> How to compose a successful critical commentary:

> 1. You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.

> 2. You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

> 3. You should mention anything you have learned from your target.

> 4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/03/28/daniel-den...

I add thoughts here: http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/01/28/links-for-january-2015...

But, are you disagreeing or agreeing with me? LOL, j/k. Things are always so subtle with human communication. It is always fun to watch/see people put down rules to manage the psychology of communication (referring to original thread). But following rules, or have conscious awareness of the least minimum rules (etiquette is a better word) is always so important in having a reasonable environment.

Thanks for sharing that list.

I've seen it put as "steelmanning" an argument, as the opposite of a strawman. A strawman misrepresents the opposing argument to make it weaker; a steelman interprets an argument as strongly as possible before refuting it.

At the very least, I try to phrase feedback as "this is awesome; I particularly like the ability to ... and the approach addressing .... I think it would help to also ...", or similar statements that make it clear what's good before commenting on what could be improved.

It's an excellent list. A little amusing as Dennett's own debating style is a touch more robust than this might suggest. Though in all fairness, if it's him vs. another philosopher of similar standing, both with subtle and complex positions built up over 40+ year careers, working through steps 1 - 3 might lengthen the discussion somewhat.

That reads like some of the mediation or non-violent communication advice I've heard.

The point is that it lets people feel like they've been heard and understood.

I also like the (related) idea of an Ideological Turing Test:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_Turing_Test

That's a really good idea; you shouldn't just be able to restate the opposing argument as a devil's advocate, you should be able to understand all the arguments well enough to make them as effectively as any advocate. And you shouldn't sound like a caricature of that position unless all advocates of that position sound equally ridiculous.

"you shouldn't sound like a caricature of that position unless all advocates of that position sound equally ridiculous"

No, you owe it to yourself to make the best possible argument for the other side's position. It might still sound ridiculous in the end, but you really want to nail it and understand the argument. If for no other reason to expand your thinking on your side.

Sadly, you probably should also understand the sound bites, but that is concession to how the world works and not your own education.

> No, you owe it to yourself to make the best possible argument for the other side's position. It might still sound ridiculous in the end, but you really want to nail it and understand the argument. If for no other reason to expand your thinking on your side.

I think we're saying the same thing. I was suggesting that in some cases, the arguments really don't hold water at all, and there's no way to make them sound otherwise. In which case, if you're attempting to pass a Turing-like test for sounding like someone advocating that position, you're going to sound equally ridiculous.

Sometimes, the best thing to do is repeat someone's ridiculous view back to them. Most of the time, I get "yes, that's correct" back and can be sure there's no point in continuing. Saves time and energy.

I ended a debate with a local firebrand Baptist with a simple question. He insisted atheists are immoral, so I said: "It sounds like you're saying I'm immoral."

"It does sound a little ridiculous when you put it that way. You seem like a decent person, if a little more sinful than average."

Apparently he was so used to talking exclusively to other religious people that he assumed everyone shared the same concept of morality, which for him was tied up in religious law. It didn't occur to him that alternate morality frameworks (like humanism) could exist, so he assumed atheists were immoral.

I used to try to do that.

Then some people were against gay marriage. And I listened to their arguments - or tried to because they literally didn't have a single one based on logic.

So if I was to follow that rule I couldn't critize such people at all.

Which lead me to the following conclusion: all of these rules of debate are excellent when you sit around the tables in Oxford or similar places or the debate is held under the Chatham house rules with a selection process for the invites.

Outside, in the real world, arguments are politics, which is just war fought by other means, and should be treated as such, for the same reason that you end up with defect-defect in the prisoners dilemma.

You end up with defect-defect in the prisoner's dilemma only in theory. In practice, you tend to get mutual cooperation. The prisoner's dilemma is an incomplete picture of human rationality. It assumes you are playing against an agent you can't actually identify with.

That is true, I guess I should have specified that I meant it between entities (people, countries, etc) that really disliked each other.

I think you're right! It's difficult to communicate tone and other 'out of band' stuff through text. This is what Wikipedia's "Assume good faith" guideline is to addresses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith

I think you nailed the real problem, which is that people have become so quick to write off anyone who ruffles their feathers at all.

Drew Houston describes the HN feedback he received for Dropbox as all the motivation he needed to keep going. He also explained that he knew it was a hit because of how many people were saying negative things.

Today though, any truly critical comment means you're either a hater or a troll. Every person is either a friend or an enemy. Inside the club or outside the club. You can't sincerely like something, and also be very critical about aspects of it, without instantly transforming into a jealous hater.

Assuming the worst about other people is probably the most negative thing you can do. Everyone is a mixed bag.

Sometimes I like to ask a lot of critical questions because I care and I really like it.

Other times because I'm trying to rip it to shreds. It's probably impossible to tell for someone online which mode I am in.

I would like to say though that as someone who occasionally makes things, I do appreciate proper critique and I do like to hear about different view points.

Voicing legitimate and non-pedantic disagreement in a polite manner is to me one of the major features HN offers, simply because it's a collection of interesting people.

Myself, I don't always agree with the majority opinion either. For example, I disagree with Sam's opinion about AGI, and even though that particular comment was received quite badly, I never meant it to be anything else but an invitation to see things from another perspective.

he knew it was a hit because of how many people were saying negative things

Most get negative reviews, few are hits. The irony is that I've seen that thread and I thought it was generally well-received.

The corrections I find the most frustrating are the ones that attempt to frame something that is reasonably a difference of opinion as a black/white, right/wrong issue.

A made up example using something that is about as subjective as possible: No, that's wrong, strawberries are awful.

(just changing that to "I disagree, ..." gets rid of a lot of the nonsense)

There also ends up being a lot of what is essentially squabbling, comments going back and forth over what someone meant, or pedantically squishing some point that had done a good enough job of transmitting the idea (I'm all for being careful when it matters, I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter all the time).

The pedantic bickering is brutal because you cannot collapse threads.

The whole site needs rewriting and modernizing. Considering the audience, it's kind of shocking how stale it is.

I'm tempted to chalk that up to HN being, essentially, a pet project implemented in a toy language as a not entirely open source[0] forum maintained by volunteers. Of course, I don't know but that's my guess, that pg just didn't work very hard on polishing up the parts he didn't find personally interesting. For some reason, people seem to be weirdly elitist about HN's layout, and act as if any slight change to the UI is going to allow the barbarians of the internet to storm the gates, until Hacker News is aught but cat memes and ashes.

[0] The language and original forum are, obviously, open source. But AFAIK you can't make pull requests against the code HN is actually running, which has had tons of modifications made to it, because that's special sauce. There used to be a repo for making bug and feature requests but that seems to no longer be active.

Of course, you could roll your own minimalistic threaded forum, but getting people to move from HN anywhere other than lobste.rs[1] (if they want more moderation) or reddit (if they want less) might be difficult, unless you're serving some specific niche like DataTau[2].

[1]https://lobste.rs/

[2]http://www.datatau.com/

Considering the audience you might be right. I'm not a typical audience member. I read in the evening on a phone with a slow 2.5g connection. For that reason I use opera mini. HN works perfectly on it and the combination of the browser and whatever it is HN does for layout means I can load a HN page faster than anything else on the web. It doesn't seem to matter how many comments there are. So I hope it doesn't change. But you are right. I'm not typical.

I have a sneaking suspicion that maybe, just maybe, the looks of HN have helped protect the community against trolls. Everybody knows internet commenting is crude, rude and awful more often than not. In my opinion HN is a glorious example of an online community done right and I'm not sure we should change the site.

But who knows, maybe it will even be better if it gets a little make-over.

Trolls exist on HN, I assure you. They're not scared off by the simplicity of the layout.

They exist but they are not that many. The spartan layout might be one reason.

There might be a correlation, but I doubt it's a strong one. Maybe there just aren't that many unique accounts here, and this isn't a particularly mainstream site. There are reasons to be turned off of Hacker News that go beyond the layout.

Imageboards can have pretty low-tech and annoyingly obtuse UX as well but trolls adapt and abound because there are no user accounts and they know they have an audience. Most of the trolling I think i've seen here has been done through throwaway accounts, so who knows whether or not those are sockpuppets of existing accounts or people showing up from /g/ to have some fun?

I think features can benefit the individual without damaging the community. For example, AJAX enabled replies would leave me in the place I was reading, rather than taking me back to the top of the page, requiring me to hit 'back' twice after every comment. It would be nice if the 'next' link always worked too, instead of just throwing an error if you're browsing too slowly.

Email replies are covered by HN Notify, which, while hacky, does the job. It would be nice to have a simple Reddit-style red envelope, though, rather than clicking my username, then 'Comments' to see if I've had replies.

Of course, there are people who will say, "How much effort is it to click the back button?" but the irony is that these are exactly the kind of bad UX choices that the HN community would criticize any "Show HN" for.

I find the dissuasion away from multiple levels of replies as though in-depth discussion is a bad thing to be bewildering. Comments like "Replying here because I can't reply deeper" shouldn't need to exist. Apparently it's to prevent arguments, but collapsible comments would hide away anything you don't want to follow further.

"It would be nice to have a simple Reddit-style red envelope, though, rather than clicking my username, then 'Comments' to see if I've had replies."

I agree that a notification of replies would be useful. Small tip, instead of clicking your username then clicking on comments, which is something I did for a long time too, just click on the threads link at the top of the page. Takes you to the same content, but in one click rather than two.

I'm not sure what made reddit turn so bad (and I mostly mean the default subreddits and the subscribers rather than the site itself) but I hope that some care is taken to avoid it. HN is a breath of fresh air compared to reddit and I would endure a lot of bad UX if it helped keep it that way.

> I'm not sure what made reddit turn so bad

Popularity, I guess. It became a very general interest site that covers a wide range of interests, and therefore appeals to an equally wide range of visitors -- including those with, shall we say, poor taste and etiquette. HN, on the other hand, is largely centered around the working programmer, a group of people who, for the most part, are looking for something interesting rather than memetic jibber jabber.

The site in general is good, but the user moderation system is utterly awful. A 'disagree' mod double-functions as a censor, and there's no need because there's also a separate flagging system. My profile page has a bit of a rant about the shortcomings of the mod system here with more detail.

The autodetection algorithms probably need tweaking as well - from time to time I see users with polite comment histories mysteriously getting shadowbanned. Sometimes another user will look into it and post a comment to that effect, but without a user-to-user messaging system or a method to reply to dead comments, there's no guarantee that a shadowbanned user will see a friendly message.

Not only does it censor, it gives some people undue power. A few days ago, I commented on a now flagkilled post. Within a couple of hours, some 15-20 other people had commented on it, and each and every post, except mine, was grayed out from downvotes. I had gotten a downvote too, but I had enough votes to counterbalance the briagading. I read the other comments, but did not notice anything nasty or disrespectful in there.

This abuse of power is ruining the system for those who have new accounts or only post occasionally.

I would like to put the downvote to rest. The upvote seems like it would be sufficient? The better comments rise to the top. The lesser comments are left at the bottom.

I've noticed a big improvement since dang took off the invisibility cloak. All the famous attempts at replacing HN tried to solve community problems technologically (like public referral trees and user-based discussions), but they all fall short of just having a visible and active moderator.

It also helps that dang has been willing - eager, even - to issue a mea culpa and reverse a decision. In other words, he's willing to admit to mistakes, or if not mistakes, at least sincere and reasoned discussion. This goes a long way. He doesn't just say, "Hey, I decided, you live with it."

"the looks of HN have helped protect the community against trolls."

Trolls just use the add-ons. Trolls will put in effort that normal users would not. A lot of online communities design based on the idea that trolls are lazy, and I think that has not served us well.

That's true if you assume that every feature moves the community forward. But not all of them do; many features regress us. For instance: unlike on Reddit, there's no indication when someone's responded to one of your questions. As a result, very few arguments last more than a few hours here.

I'm particularly leery of collapsible threads, although my understanding is we're about to get them anyways.

> I'm particularly leery of collapsible threads

May I ask why? As someone who considers that the one change/improvement I'd like to see on HN I'm curious what there is to be leery of that I may not have considered.

Because this isn't like reddit where the most upvoted comments are elevated in otherwise collapsed threads. I've only read some of the most insightful and interesting comments and discussions on HN buried most of the way down the page because they were available for me to see despite their lack of being voted on. On HN, popularity isn't valuable, the ideas are, and non-precollapsed threads support that.

Sometimes the good stuff isn't even on the first page. For example, see [0] (scroll down to the follow up) and the HN discussion [1] referenced there. Also, collapsible threads doesn't have to mean pre-collapsed threads.

To me it seems like collapsible threads would help, not harm, in this case because more people would have collapsed the OT first thread and participated in the discussion about the actual topic. I realize there are two assumptions built in to the above that may not always be true: 1) OT threads are bad or less desirable and 2) more people in a discussion is better.

0 http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2012/03/29/a-womans-story.ht... 1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3772292

I'd argue that the main point of collapsible (not pre-collapsed) threads is to support what you're saying. When a comment spawns several pages of discussion on a topic you're not interested it, collapsing it would let you go directly to the next comment you are interested in, surely?

Right now, for me at least I often just scroll down to the next top-level comment because it's a bother to find the end of a comment tree that started several indentations in.

I use Reddit Enhancement Suite to collapse all child comments by default, then open interesting top-level comments in a new tab to read the full discussion. I probably miss a lot of good discussion on HN because it doesn't support something similar.

> Because this isn't like reddit where the most upvoted comments are elevated in otherwise collapsed threads.

HN supporting collapsible threads doesn't mean automatically collapsing threads.

That concern could easily be remedied by having thread collapsing be an optional setting in your account. I personally think having every thread collapse after a certain depth would make it much easier to tell which threads are probably worth looking deeper into.

very few arguments last more than a few hours here.

Very few posts last more than a few hours here :)

There have been times where I've gone to bed, then checked HN in the morning, and some huge issue or release has happened, there's a quality thread with hundreds of comments, and it's largely inactive because everyone's had their say already, so they're not checking for new stuff.

I'm not supporting reply alerts as I also think they'll do more harm than good, just noting that posts come and go pretty quickly.

I'm subscribed to HN Notify, and personally, while I admit I sometimes use it to carry on unproductive arguments, I also often get replies that are positive or neutral in tone and contribute more information to the discussion; since they're replies to me and to whatever specific point I commented on, I'm generally interested in reading them even if the version of the entire discussion I originally read did a decent job of covering the topic. (Actually, scrolling through a list of my HN Notify emails, it seems non-negative replies are by far the most common case. I don't remember them as such, probably because involved arguments stand out more than random bits of discussion.) Therefore, I'm glad to have the service, and I'm skeptical that it would really be so bad to give it to users who aren't savvy enough to know that HN Notify exists.

Counterpoint: unless you are on HN all the time it is often impossible to get answer to a question because the post is a few hours old.

Worse: There is no point in comming back and edit you post with sources because by that time nobody is going to see it.

Disaster: There is no benefit to writing a thoughful, well sourced comment in the first place because nobody will read it by the time you are done.

I disagree. A lot of HN's character and culture are a result of how unmodern/unconventional it is.

For example, not being able to get reply updates by email means you have to come back to the site to check, for example. Is that good or bad? I don't know the answer, but it selects a different audience. A modern HN would be a different HN community and culture.

It is actually possible to get e-mail notifications via this external service: http://hnnotify.com/

However, that still makes it a conscious choice to engage with the service that way - the default way is still checking back, and that shapes the general usage patterns of the site, even if some people have concluded it benefits them more to modify their experience.

Yes, good point.

Check out the Hacker News Enhancement Suite for Chrome.

Comment collapsing and new comment highlighting are both excellent reasons to use the extension.

rampant negativity...seems to have gotten less common recently

HN does do a good job of weeding out uselessly negative comments and other trolling behavior. If you want proof of that, go to your profile and turn on "Show Dead". It is amazing to see how many people are shadow banned yet continue to post on a daily basis. I've seen several accounts that have posted daily for years completely unaware nobody is seeing anything they post. They know nobody has ever upvoted or downvoted their comment or replied to it but just can't seem to make the connection that they're shadow banned.

> I've seen several accounts that have posted daily for years completely unaware nobody is seeing anything they post.

I may be in the minority here, but I do not consider this a good result for anyone.

Agreed. Wish there was a way to upvote dead comments that I liked to contribute to their status being reconsidered.

Soon there will be!

That's a wonderful change to consider, thank-you.

I've noticed the opposite. I browse with showdead on, and roughly half the time I'm left to wonder what on earth transgression the person committed to merit being silenced in that way after examining their comment history.

I browse with showdead on as well. A lot of the time it does hit the target. Other times someone appears to be shadowbanned from only a couple of snarky comments a while back but before and after were polite. Occasionally it hits people that have only ever been polite, and I'm left scratching my head.

One of the most negative habits is in my opinion the failure to read a comment charitably (to make an effort to interpret it in the best possible light

I don't even want charitable interpretation necessarily—I just want close reading and reasonably deep understanding of the topic! For example, the top reply to this comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8941152 totally misses the plot.

Looking through my recent comment history, though, I'm impressed at the overall quality of the responses.

This goes both ways. If I think someone has misinterpreted me, I usually apologize for being unclear and clarify my statement. I would rather clear it up than start a flamewar, even if someone else might be itching for one.

Why should I try to interpret comments in the best possible light? I could make an effort to interpret them in the worst possible light, too. I have no reason to believe that internet commenters mean well.

The issue is really with speed of judgement. It's all too easy to become close minded after judging something, especially when judging something negatively. The key is remaining open minded as long as possible to take in more information, then you're in a better place to judge. Disagreement in a respectful manner is a reflection of how you've balanced the positive and negative, if you prejudge Internet commenters you'll have made it much harder on yourself to find that balance.

> Why should I try to interpret comments in the best possible light?

Because doing so contributes to the community and not doing so harms it.

When you respond to the strongest interpretation of a comment, you're responding to what's most substantive in it. That raises the signal/noise ratio for everybody, and curiosity is what we're trying to optimize for.

There is a different between the "strongest" interpretation of a comment and the "best possible light".

For example, if somebody tells me "Angersock, you can go happily fuck yourself", I'm not going to expect them to be wishing me a rousing and cheerful round of masturbation--that is the "best possible light", but not the "strongest interpretation".

Properly handled, assuming the worst of a comment, articulating the argument you think is being made, and then rebutting it, is far better than just assuming the best--provided it's done civilly, of course.

You're responding to a pretty weak interpretation of what we're talking about here. :) The point is to address the strongest plausible interpretation of what another is saying. It's pretty well-established what the Principle of Charity means [1]. (By the way, you can see from [2] that there's an ongoing discussion about formalizing it for HN.)

I don't think it's a stretch, mutatis mutandis, to take even a comment like "go fuck yourself" charitably. It could, indeed probably mostly does, mean "I'm angry about something unrelated."

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

2. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20principle%20of%2...

Since "you can happily go fuck yourself" is not in fact an argument, the principle of charity does not demand that you interpret it as anything more than a rude interjection. At its strongest, it would require you to assume that the commenter was legitimately upset and deeply invested in the argument, which would perhaps keep you from responding in kind.

> At its strongest, it would require you to assume that the commenter was legitimately upset and deeply invested in the argument

I don't think even at its strongest the PoC would require you to assume that the commenter was legitimately upset, only that the commenter was intending to express that they were upset.

The PoC only applies to interpreting what the intended message is, not to conclusions about its justification as would be necessary to support the interpretation that the commenter was legitimately upset.

I can't help but suggest that your pretty nitpicky distinction between "interpret[ing] in the best possible light" and "rebutting the argument you think is being made" is, perhaps, not interpreting the argument for the guideline in the best possible light.

Because HN has an international audience where English is often a second language; also cultural expectations can be markedly different to the US.

This is a much larger factor on HN than I think most people realize.

Even within the US.

Pedantic "corrections" that offer no additional value are seen as pretty contemptible behavior in real life, so you probably shouldn't make a habit of it.

This is either a non sequitur or a wildly uncharitable read of the remark you're replying to.

A bigger project than HN that has put a lot of time into the norm we're talking about today is Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith

That actually came from the original C2 Wiki, although it's been refactored (across sites apparently...it's now on MeatBall) significantly since I first came across it c. 2003:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AssumeGoodFaith

I suspect it's a much older idea than that, probably dating back to the Enlightenment. It's closely related to the Principle of Charity, which was coined in 1958 but again, refers to a much older principle of logical discourse:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

> That actually came from the original C2 Wiki

That's fascinating! Has anyone traced it to its precise origin there? I'd love to see that.

Here's the obvious link to Archive.org ('02):

http://web.archive.org/web/20020502092511/http://www.usemod....

I think the Principle of Charity is pretty spot on for 1958. I suspect John Rawls said something assuming good faith, too, given the quotes I've found [1]:

In his book A Theory of Justice, Rawls stated that citizens are obliged to act in good faith, and to assume good faith on the part of others until clear proof emerges to the contrary. They must recognize, in effect, that the system cannot meet everybody's claims at once and accept that at times they will be on the losing side.

And a good recent blog post [2]:

Several maxims guided me in doing this. I always assumed, for example, that the writers we were studying were always much smarter than I was. If they were not, why was I wasting my time and the students’ time by studying them? If I saw a mistake in their arguments, I supposed they saw it too and must have dealt with it, but where? So I looked for their way out, not mine.

[1] http://www.rbc.com/aboutus/letter/may_jun1995.html

[2] https://parentheticalpilgrim.wordpress.com/2015/03/14/good-f...

Think about the possible outcomes:

Wrongly assume the best: It quickly becomes apparent, things move forward, you may even steer things in a better direction.

Wrongly assume the worst: You look like a jerk, possibly demotivated people or made them feel bad, and now there is an air of conflict that needs to be ventilated by unnecessarily defensive comments.

Because the failure conditions are worse.

Let's see, here are the possibilities:

1. Someone means well, you interpret it as them meaning well and respond accordingly. Everything is fine and dandy, everyone's happy. 2. Someone means well, and you interpret them as meaning ill, and respond accordingly. Now you are angry for no reason, they have had the experience of making a well meaning comment and being shot down for it. Everyone is miserable. 3. Someone means ill, and you interpret it as them meaning ill, and respond accordingly. Now they have gotten the thrill of getting through to you (remember, they mean ill, so that is their intent), and you are angry (for a good reason). You've made yourself miserable and a troll happy. 4. Someone means ill, and you interpret it as them meaning well and respond accordingly. Now they don't get the pleasure of having bothered you, you have shrugged it off an it's not great loss to you. You are now happier than option 3, and they haven't had a chance to hurt you like they meant to.

Of course, real life isn't quite a simple as that; but that does cover a very large number of possible interactions on the internet. By biasing yourself toward the most charitable interpretation of others comments, you reduce the risk of a simple misunderstanding leading to everyone being unhappy, reduce the risk of just giving a troll exactly what they want, and contribute to a more positive environment in general.

It really does help out in an awful lot of cases, and reduces friction dramatically if you always assume good faith unless you have very compelling evidence to the contrary.

Generous interpretations raise discourse. Because they're attempts to find strong versions of positions.

However, it takes two to tango; worthwhile discussion is a cooperative venture. There's systematic reasons why a forum is incapable of reaching a certain level. Take Twitter and misogyny. (Or HN for that matter; Twitter's rampant death threats shouldn't lower expectations when evaluating other forums.)

Because if your goal is learn something in a dialogue, not win internet points, you'll want to understand the strongest version of someone's argument -- which isn't necessarily what they wrote verbatim.

Let's assume for the sake of simplicity that the debate concerns a non-subjective question, so it has a right answer, only it is unknown which it is.

The best outcome for HN is if we as a community converge on the right answer.

Now if someone brings argues poorly, but for the right answer, and then someone comes along and crushes the poor argument. Then the counter-arguer "wins" and succeeds in humiliating the "opponent". But the the wrong answer wins, and that is bad for the community

If on the other hand, someone comes along, reinforces the poor argument, and then brings a weak counterargument, then that gives the right answer a better chance of winning.

Agreed. This really got on my nerves a few weeks ago and I couldn't resist going meta (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9013259). There's even a Wikipedia article on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

Your posting of this a little while back has caused me to think to myself "Geez, 'Principle of charity' would be useful here" over and over and over since you originally posted that. Really useful name to put to a concept like that. So. Thanks!

A related issue is people downvoting comments that they haven't properly comprehended. Instead of asking "why do you think x" or "do you mean x" they just downvote the comment. Sometimes it happens with controversial comments, even when the controversial comment is based on facts. Sometimes going against HN groupthink (e.g. saying something bad about libertarianism) results in downvotes.

EDIT: I'm surprised that I got a downvote on this comment. I think that illustrates the problem.

> EDIT: I'm surprised that I got a downvote on this comment. I think that illustrates the problem.

I think it illustrates the problem with "sometimes UI elements get clicked without intent" and "HN has no way to undo up/downvotes".

In fact, I can say that with authority, since I was the one who made the accidental click.

This seems not to be the only reason:

There seems to be a consistent tendency that some people downvote comments not because the comments are wrong but because accepting the comment would undermine their position/opinion. See anything that touches into google/apple/feminism

Off topic, but the idea that the HN "groupthink" is libertarian seems ridiculous to me... Other than the NSA stuff which is superficially libertarian, I don't see it at all.

The prevailing attitude here is sort of vague lefty-"liberal", basically what you'd expect from, well, a bunch of college students and recent graduates who don't take politics too seriously and live in places like SF and NYC.

I'm talking about things like not wanting to be searched at the airport, not wanting any NSA surveillance or spying, not wanting copyright theft to be illegal, etc. Libertarian seems a more correct word to describe these positions than liberal, as the common theme is distrust of authority.

I find it a little ironic that your comment was downvoted, even though your comment was a very reasonably presented and valid opinion. I just upvoted you. Another example of the problem with the downvote button.

IMO there is no need at all for a downvote button -- it just causes more problems than it ever solves. Much better to just have a 'flag' button for abusive/inappropriate comments, and an upvote button.

I'm surprised that I got a downvote on this comment. I think that illustrates the problem.

Sometimes when I've said something perfectly reasonable and then gotten downvoted, I've realized that in fact my statement was unclear and liable to be misunderstood. The downvotes have helped me to write more clearly, and they're more charitable than rude rejoinders.

[I didn't downvote you. Your statements were perfectly reasonable to me.]

> Instead, people often tend to misread or miserunderstand > what's being said, only to use the opportunity to write a > "correction" based on that false impression.

Part of this issue is what at Stackoverflow was called the "Fastest Gun in the West Problem" [1].

I think a successful strategy on HN is: Write many comments really quickly and take the risk that some of them are bad or even wrong. The incentive for being an early commenter outbalances the penalty for being wrong sometimes.

[1] http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/10/solving-the-fastest-gu...

> One of the most negative habits is in my opinion the failure to read a comment charitably

More generally - the failure to r e a d the article/parent comment etc.

(People who disagree with me seems particularly prone to this :-P )

Such a problem could always be solved by phrasing your response as a question.

"No, it's actually this way" vs "Have you considered the possibility that it's this way?" carries the same information with drastically different results.

Yup. Not just comments, always trying to find the alleged negative aspects of everything and clinging only onto that, without so much as acknowledging other possibilities.

This is the reason I stopped reading HN as much, just as I stopped reading comments everywhere else on the internet. I don't want to tiptoe through arguments trying to preventively push aside all possible misinterpretations or people trying to put words in my mouth.

This is not critical thinking, this is just cynic criticism.

I don't mind the negativity on HN and sometimes it's even helpful if I can avoid getting upset, but the negative comments on Amazon really make it hard to decide what to buy.

> people often tend to misread or miserunderstand what's being said

This is like the phenomenon examined in this 2005 paper: Egocentrism Over E-Mail: Can We Communicate as Well as We Think?[1]

From the abstract:

> Without the benefit of paralinguistic cues such as gesture, emphasis, and intonation, it can be difficult to convey emotion and tone over electronic mail. [...] this limitation is often underappreciated, such that people tend to believe that they can communicate over e-mail more effectively than they actually can.

When we read a HN comment negatively, we should second guess our interpretation of it before we reply. We may not have perceived it the way the author intended.

Likewise when writing comments, we should ask ourselves if our wording might be received more negatively than we realize.

[1] http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/nicholas.epley/krugeretal05....

Another factor, although probably less prominent, is responsiveness. Back when I used to code on a MUD I noticed that conversations on one of the messages boards were much more likely to heat up than chat sessions. Just being able to react and clarify things from one sentence to the next makes a big difference.

I suppose it's possible there's also some sort of face-to-face feel with chat that encourages sympathetic responses.

I'd say social cues are important. When you write in text you're really speaking in the tone and voice of someone's mind - which means their current emotional state, perception of the writer etc.

The only reliable way I've found to make text only social interaction work is basically to be what feels like overly nice. Which manages to average out to a casual conversation in the real world - I think. I mean who knows?

This comment brings to mind the concept of the the steel man [1][2].

Steelmanning an argument means to go one step further. In addition to selecting the most charitable parts of another person's argument, one seeks to improve on it, by making it the best possible representation of the other persons position.

From there, one can offer their own counterpoint, to this improved version.

[1] https://themerelyreal.wordpress.com/2012/12/07/steelmanning/

[2] http://lesswrong.com/lw/85h/better_disagreement/

Theatre Sports (competitive collaborative dramatic improvisation) has the concepts of offer, accept, and block.

Accepting an offer means to build on it in some way, as a real part of the scene - in the way you mean.

A block is when you ignore or undermine the offer, denying it instead of building on it. There's temptation to do so for a cheap laugh. The uncharitable negativity of HN seems similar.

One thing that took me a while to understand as a player - accepting doesn't always mean ignoring conflict. If you offer me something, I accept that your version of reality is true; I don't have to agree with specific parts of it.

For example, if someone starts a scene with "Isn't it lovely to be here in Paris?", I accept that we are in Paris, but I don't have to think it's lovely.

The takeaway from this to non-improv discussions is that I'm more aware of the fact that although I might disagree with the comment someone makes, I accept that the writer has that opinion and that they believe it to be true, and if I want to challenge any part of it then I'm going to have a much better time of it if I start from their version of reality.

Accepting means logging|auditing?

I hope the order in which these comments lead to yours will stay this way in the future. for reference: https://www.dropbox.com/s/xh6gdqlm8jargi4/Screenshot%202015-...

Why? They perfectly highlight what's the "good common-sense reply" is like, how we should measure with each other opinions and how to handle disagreements.

HN might as well included the conversation as an example.

Sounds not dissimilar to the "bid/turn towards/turn away" terminology in Gottman relationship theory.

Log is an act we miss. (Change is act limited by log law.)

The steelmanning combinatorially #buildingmentalhealth and emotional regulation while mods are drone operators hiddren unrestricted violently cutting and copping audit logs to get page views clear for what depth of order of self empowerment determination?

[1] http://web.archive.org/*/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?i... [2] https://archive.today/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9... [3] http://www.webcitation.org/query?id=1428133249694151

At the risk of further derailing the thread, I wonder if there might be a more inclusive term than 'steel man' — I don't feel great about using that phrase to describe 'the best possible representation of a position.' (The issue is fresh in my mind, since I stumbled across the gender-neutral alternative 'straw person'[1] this morning.)

[1] http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HCA/2013/18.html, para 21.

I was attacked for being "PC" the last time I used straw person here on HN. I just thought it sounded better, but the poster was adamant that I was responsible for all the ills in society.

Hopefully, this new guideline will avert similar incidents.

Considering how toxic PC people are to debates (ironically exactly because the gratuitus negativity they bring) that is more than a defence mechanism that any healthy community needs to develop to protect itself.

Political correctness should be considered the same as writing a negative comment.

You might get fewer downvotes if you define "PC" and offer some examples so we understand your perspective. Most people who rail against "being PC" are walking pits of gratuitous negativity, so people are probably assuming you're one of them.

PC: Political correctness.

Best example of my head: the developer on Node.js who got haunted to hell because he reversed a change from he to some gender-neutral term. For the feeling of some undefined person Node.js, and I suspect open source in general, lost a good developer.

Other example: after landing a satelite on a rock tens of thousands of miles away the lead of the rocket team is forced to make a tearful apology because is found to wear a shirt with semi-dress women and guns on it. Said shirt being made by his friend, who is a woman.

Other example: dongle gate, github metocracy.

So yeah, a few of these people may, sometimes, have a point, but the community will be much better of if we kick them out on sight.

This seems a bit different from my example: being attacked for using a less common term. In this case, the "PC police" (going by your examples) were the people attacking me because I used a term that offended them.

They attacked you because they assume, incorrectly, that you were one of the PC people, because you used a PC term, not just a less common term. This isn't unreasonable and the cost of letting PC people in is high.

It's not a "PC word." I like the way the word sounds more, so I use it. Word choice is my prerogative as a writer.

It is a PC word. Your choice of word is as you said, your prerogative. How people read it is theirs.

What benefit would that bring? Sure we will be more inclusive to the people who don't understand that steelmanning comes from the (opposite) strawmanning, which comes from strawmen, which have been called so for centuries.

Is a person who gets offended by that really the kind of person you want on HN?

I tried to express my comment in a way that made it clear I wasn't attacking the parent. I realise that 'straw man' is centuries old, like many of the terms that are now coming to be supplanted by inclusive alternatives. Of course using such terms doesn't make you a bad person, but I think we can all benefit from considering the connotations of the words we use. Even if you think the harm caused by non-inclusive language is negligible, in many cases it costs you nothing to use an alternative, so why not do it?

I'll note that straw-man seems very common in language flame wars. Steelmanning in that specific context would tend to make one examine the particular context in which the language is most used and why. Come to think of it, many language discussions would vanish in a puffs of pointlessness if it weren't for the many levels of subtlety with which one can disguise straw-man.

Sadly it's spawned by the rampant ignorance most intellectual people face on a daily basis. This creates a cynicism and impulsive reaction to "check off" that perspective without vetting it further. This will be a good case study in guidelines that defy human behavior. It is tendency for many to go against this policy, which is why it was begat. Interesting how Y Combinator is wanting to thwart group think I welcome the spike.

There's a well established social phenomena for what you describe as uncharitable reading the words / actions of other people. It's called the fundamental attribution error.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

It has been studied in detail with respect to computer mediated communications as far back as the dawn of email and the tendency of readers to assign a lot more negativity to the emails they receive then their senders ever intended.

Another issue is that text is quite poor at conveying tone, both on HN and elsewhere. Saw something recently about adding emoji's for tone.

Yes I can count with one hand the people that consistently uses the Principle of Charity.

And the saddest part is not seeing the interlocutor full of himself and completely ignoring the fact that, by not using this principle, he makes his own argument weaker (showing that his intelligence didn't reached those heights).

The saddest part is the public false victory because depending on the peers (audience), he will likely be perceived as in a stronger position when the opposite is true.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

Always interpreting what was said to him in the most intelligent light is the distinguishing behavior of my favorite professor from grad school. If people are constantly correcting you on jumping to the wrong conclusion, and telling you they actually meant something else, then you are not as smart as you think you are in that context. (Yes, this is indeed related to Dunning-Kruger!)

On the other hand, my favorite professor would often come out with an interpretation of what someone said that was levels more intelligent than what was said. Then the reaction would be surprise or even delight on the part of the other. (Sometimes, I think this was a deliberate tactic to keep the conversation on a higher level.)

One of the smartest men I've ever met.

Yes, there are parts of this community very uncomfortable with things they do not understand or agree with, and are very quick to argue or dismiss rather than try and see the value of the contribution or different point of view. Reddit went through the same shift as it became more popular.

There is hope: one of my best received comments was a gentle chiding of someone who had belittled someone's comment.

Can we also have a rule against Gratuitous Positivity?

Seriously, it's a slippery slope. "Nothing of substance" is a term that needs more clarification that what that post provides. It seems to suggest that if the criticism is too harsh, then it's no longer substantial. I think there's a better guideline than that.

The best ideas not only can withstand criticism, they get better with criticism. If you examine what's being revealed about Apple and Steve Jobs -- the most successful company in the world right now -- it's not that they avoided criticism. And contrary to rumors it's not that they didn't nurture seemingly "dumb" ideas. Jobs would toss them out there all the time, by his own admission. Nurturing crazy young creative ideas and rigorous critical analysis are both part of Apple's process.

Apple's secret is that the criticism is directed at the idea not the person. That is what defines "nothing of substance": the target of the criticism, not the intensity. If it's about the idea, that's substantial, even if it's harsh. If it becomes personal, then that's truly not adding substance.

You "throw it in the cauldron" and then rigorously debate everything in the pot in a manner divorced from the people who contributed it. That's how you boil it down to the best stuff, not by holding back.

The post you're responding to is at pains to explain that the new guideline isn't "no negativity", which seems to moot your concern pretty much completely.

Not at all. You've highlighted the problem with your phrase "isn't no negativity". It's a poorly defined slippery slope of a criterion. Where is the line drawn?

Banning personal attacks, but allowing unlimited criticism of ideas, is more of an objective guideline.

Unlimited criticism of ideas is fine as long as it's substantive. Critical comments must contribute something to the discussion. A reader unfamiliar with the topic of the discussion should be expect to learn something from critical comments, more than "a commenter named $foo doesn't like this thing".

Perhaps what abalone is referring to is anything seemingly positive that doesn't add any value to the discussion should also be pointed out. In other words, gratuitous comments in general, positive or negative, should not be supported. For example, we see lots of "XYZ just raised $10mil" on here and the comment section is littered with "Congrats Jim!". Should we not be downvoting those too so we keep the consistency of "I learned something here" comments?

Unwarranted positivity simply isn't as harmful as unwarranted negativity. There's basic psychology behind that, for instance, loss aversion.

I think our industry has seen more money lost, late nights spent, and souls damaged to "Unwarranted positivity" then any other cause.

"Unwarranted positivity" has also been the root cause of many of our industry's greatest successes.

The costs of negativity and discouragement are difficult to judge because they usually take the form of opportunity costs which aren't directly visible.

> The costs of negativity and discouragement are difficult to judge because they usually take the form of opportunity costs which aren't directly visible.

That has nothing to do with anything I have said. You have unfairly added an assumption to my comment and asserted I said something I did not. Saying that going too far on one side of an activity is bad does not imply that the other side is better. You have basically said because I don't think running 50 miles a day is healthy that I am advocating sloth.

> "Unwarranted positivity" has also been the root cause of many of our industry's greatest successes.

Our industries greatest successes have come from a place of optimism but been realistic in their thinking. Most programmers have suffered from people, including themselves, giving estimates that were "Unwarranted positivity".

Just a reminder that this subthread is litigating the value of unwarranted and insubstantial negativity.

Yes, which I believe has been demonstrated on one of my comments by stating a position that I did not take. I can think of no worse source of the two things you mention than forcing a position on someone who didn't take it.

> the comment section is littered with "Congrats Jim!". Should we not be downvoting those too

That is a good example of an edge case. It's already pretty accepted that "Nice article!" comments should be downvoted as noise. "Congrats Jim!" is pretty much noise as well. The difference is that "Nice article!" can be a very, very common occurrence if it's not moderated because it can occur in pretty much any post. Whereas, "Congrats Jim!" is at least celebrating something rare and very much worth congratulating in the specifically entrepreneurial focus of HN. Also, maybe you see "Congrats!" comments more than I do. But, my impression is that they are at least 10x less common than "Nice!" comments that are already widely downvoted.

There's a fine line between moderating noise and being the "HN Fun Police". There's room for fun and occasional silliness in HN. What I'd prefer there not be room for is the permeating noise of snacky/snarky "cleverness" that constantly drowns discussion in Reddit.

You're right, "congrats Jim" is an edge case, but so are the cases of "this sucks" or "commenter $foo doesn't like this" one-liners. That's a complete straw man. That stuff, as you note, already gets downvoted.

Sam is targeting something else. The post is wading into the realm of "gratuitous" negativity (or "unwarranted", to use tptacek's equally slippery qualifier), which is not necessarily just brief, unsupported stuff. It's clear I think that Sam is getting at the disheartening feeling that entrepreneurs can experience when facing a withering critique of a nascent project.

We want a supportive community but a withering critique can actually help ideas get better. This guideline is ill-defined and could be interpreted as "tone it down, folks". And paired with a move towards community moderation, it's all about interpretation.

This guideline would be better redefined around clearer, more concrete criteria.

That's a very good point. I'd be much happier if they said the new guidelines is no personal attacks. That's very clear and easy to check.

Instead we end up with this slippery slope of certain types of negativity vs. others and all it really means is the mods have a blank check to remove anything they don't like that isn't meaningless happy fun compliments.

As Sam pointed out, gratuitous negativity has always been against the guidelines. Personal attacks are, too, of course.

The way this stuff really works out is in practice, so judge it based on what you see actually happening on HN. The intention here is pretty modest: to nudge the community slightly in the hope that the culture will grow a little more aligned with the guidelines. We're not interested in false positivity either.

That doesn't mean this isn't a big deal. Gratuitous negativity is a hard problem because it's mostly unintentional. That's why the most important part of this is asking the community to gently give commenters feedback when they see it. Any significant effect of this guideline change will not be in what moderators do, but in what the community does. Given the quantity of comments posted to HN, there aren't enough moderators to make that big a dent by direct intervention anyhow. We like it that way.

When HN becomes an unending fount of positivity, we can address it then. Right now it's veering off the other side. Course correct first, finesse later.

I think it will be a while before we come to the point where a guideline against "gratuitous positivity" is required. This forum is pretty far towards the other end of the spectrum right now.

I see where you're coming from though. The comments on HN, while often being negative, and almost entirely constructive. I try reading the comments at product hunt from time to time, and while all the "beautifully designed" and "i've been using this since [earlier than you] and i love it" comments are nice and surely make the developers feel good they inevitably add nothing of value to the submission, and as far as providing useful context to the submitted link they may as well not exist.

> Can we also have a rule against Gratuitous Positivity?

We could, but I don't see any evidence that there is an amount of that going around that requires an addition to the guidelines.

You must not live in San Francisco.

> You must not live in San Francisco.

No, but I'm rather familiar with it. In any case, I don't see how that's relevant; the context of the discussion is HN guidelines, not guidelines for San Francisco.

Especially on Show HN posts, there are people that can be categorized as fanboys and haters. Both groups add nothing substantial to the discussion. The constructive, interesting and insightful comments come from the normal users.

I think the downvote functionality is holding back the utility of HN more than anything else. It is grossly overused and very rarely for guidelines violations like it was designed for. Most people use to show they disagree with a comment. It's an awful experience and is the main fuel in a negative feedback loop that travels with users from thread to thread.

I agree with this. Conflating disagreement with downvoting seems to be mixing unrelated concerns. It is currently inconvenient (in karma terms) to hold dissenting opinions.

My experience tends to be that if you can hold a dissenting opinion respectfully, and back up your assertions, HN treats it favorably in the long run.

Holding a dissenting opinion without being willing to defend it with awareness of your audience's hostility to your ideas rarely goes over well in any forum, though.

Try saying anything critical about Apple and see if this strategy works out in practice.

I've been pointing out problems with Apple and seen little punishment.

Then again I am kind of thoughtful when I do and often make sure to point out that I like Apple, and recommend it to others, -I just personally find their products annoying to use for specific reasons

I think true criticism is treated well (for example, discussing validity of walled garden in app store). It's the trollish comments, like calling Apple users sheep or ignorant hipsters that thrown money away, that are problematic.

I've been very critical of Apple in this forum, and it doesn't seem to have hurt my karma too much.

I think the topic is also important. Was the topic about a positive apple article, or a positive android or windows topic? You are more likely to draw a crowd that relates to the title's indicated company. Having a negative view point about windows is sure to get a better response in a topic that is praising an apple product.

I'm making assumptions here on anecdotes of course.

Well, I just checked, and my last comment critical of Apple (and not even charitably so) is currently at +97 karma, so I'm not quite sure the argument holds much weight.

Thanks for taking the time to look into this. I am afraid it does not address the wider concern I have of which criticquing Apple is a specific example.

On topics where there is a deep skew in the opinion held by the HN readerbase, it is probabilistically likely that going against the widely held view will receive more downvotes. This has a chilling effect on expressing dissent. Of course there will be people who will be able to mitigate this with their gravitas and eloquence. But it would be better if we can come up with a scheme where we lower the burden on people holding a dissenting opinion.

I've made many negative comments about Apple, Facebook, MS, Google, etc and did not receive downvotes for them.

If HN is tribal then attacking one tribe while praising the others might be a method to farm positive karma.

Exactly. Doing a poor job of critiquing Apple will garner downvotes. Writing a well-reasoned and supported argument critiquing Apple will get upvotes.

I think you're being a bit optimistic here. Downvotes will happen regardless of how well reasoned your argument is, and they'll come in a hurry if you hold an unpopular opinion on a sensitive/political subject. It's definitely my biggest gripe with HN -- there's too much of a political echo chamber here.

> Downvotes will happen regardless of how well reasoned your argument is

Some will, but its very rare that I've seen posts retain a net of negative moderation when they contribute substantially, regardless of the side of an issue they are on (though I've seen controversial-but-substantial comments quickly get heavily downvoted before recovering.)

And I've seen this on every side of issues -- often to opposing posts in the same discussion -- so I don't think its an "echo-chamber" effect, but more that certain topics bringout more kneejerk negative responses from people on either side.

(Its funny that, in regard to accusations of HN being an echo chamber or hivemind, I've seen various posters proclaim with confidence that it was -- and that that hivemind was, variously, liberal, leftist, libertarian, capitalist, pro-corporate, anti-corporate, and in support or opposition to various companies, and any of a number of other things. I think people are way to quick to equate some people disagreeing with or downvoting their posts to HN being a hivemind biased against them.)

My unpopular opinions frequently get early downvotes, but it seems that it'll swing back into the black given enough time/eyeballs, if I've made a good argument.

Bad threads produce bad behavior. By definition. When I see it happening, I flag the thread. Sometimes despite wishing that there could be a positive discussion of the subject because the subject is relevant and important and intellectually interesting.

I think "Maybe next time it comes up the comments won't devolve."

Of particular note, sometimes expressing an unpopular opinion on a sensitive subject (or a subject on which some people have very strong feelings, even if it's not sensitive to most people) can trigger a cascade of "revenge downvotes". So while the original comment might get upvoted back to positive, comments on completely unrelated topics might pick up undeserved downvotes.

I once had a few week period where I noticed the majority of my comments drop by exactly 2 karma, usually around the same time of day, regardless of how many upvotes they'd received or how heavily trafficked the thread was. My best guess is that I'd upset two people (or one person with two accounts) and they kept clicking back on my profile until they got bored with it.

> My experience tends to be that if you can hold a dissenting opinion respectfully, and back up your assertions, HN treats it favorably in the long run.

I think "in the long run" is key here.

When I make a comment that challenges some band of partisans, but strikes a factual tone, my observations is that it initially gets downvotes (presumably from the partisans who are hovering over the thread/story), but in the end gets moderated highly.

Interesting, what if in downvoting a comment you had to pick a reason? What are all the reasons one would downvote something?

"I do not agree" "I do not believe this adds value" "Inappropriate conduct" "I think you are being mean / rude" "Bad attempt at funny" "Off topic to parent" "Off topic to post" "Difficult to understand/Noise"

Slashdot does this.

What generally happens is that instead of one argument about been downvoted/upvoted you end up with even more arguments about whether something is +5 funny or whatever.

I've no idea how you solve this in the general case tbh.

thanks i'll check it out. I wasn't thinking to show the stats to others, possibly to provide feedback to the poster that they're 'above average' on the 'mean' or 'not relevant', etc scale.

So far, while it may not be ideal, I think HN actually hits pretty close to the sweet spot.

Part of that though is that +1 Funny doesn't add to your slashdot karma. So people sometimes "upvote to denigrate" because you can only get +5 anyway, a silly comment can get +5 Funny without actually rewarding the commenter (mocks the comment) - you can see this when replies get +5 Insightful or +5 Informative and are very contrary to the original comment.

Personally, I like the idea of having qualifiers on the downvote without one on the upvote - makes you think a little bit before downvoting... plus the vote buttons are ridiculously small on an mobile Safari - so having to click twice would prevent accidental downvotes.

I havent put a lot of thought into an ideal solution to this problem. But heres the best I have so far. Change the definition of karma to capture notability which would be a monotonically increasing number. So when a person mark a comment as notable, it increases your karma score by 1. Seperately have a agree / disagree score per comment whose lifetime is limited to a particular thread. Within a thread a reader can use the agree / disagree scores of comment to selectively read both sides of the debate.

I don't have a strong opinion on whether that'd work, but it sounds a lot like the Slashdot comment moderation system. Perhaps someone with a good level of experience of posting on Slashdot can help shed some light on how it works out in practice.

I think it works well (been reading and posting to /. for about 15 years), and if I designed a forum then it'd work the same way. The trick is it forces you to justify your opinion in some way. There isn't a "-1 Disagree" or "+1 Right On" so to mod a comment you have to find some actual flaw with it, or justify why you think it should be raised above the rest. If you pick a dumb reason that clearly can't be justified based on the text, meta-moderators will wash things out later.

That said, it's not perfect. There are -1 Overrated and +1 Underrated mods. I would not have these if I was king for a day, because:

• They apparently somehow bypass meta-moderation, or have done in the past (!) so not surprisingly they get abused a lot

• They are vague and don't force you to justify what's good or bad about a post, in many cases I have seen abuse of these mod types devolve into reddit style agree/disagree modding

• They don't adjust the adjective that goes with the post, so for a long time and maybe still now you can get posts like +5 Troll or -1 Insightful, which is just confusing and generally bogus

Stripping out Underrated and Overrated would improve things a lot. I'd maybe make +1 Funny count for karma too because funny posts deliver a lot of value to the slashdot reading experience, IMO, and I see no problem with encouraging them.

I think the balance of adjectives is important though. There is no -1 Wrong or -1 Misinformed mod and that's important. If someone posts something polite, earnest and completely wrong there's no justifiable word to mod them down with. Instead you have to wait for a reply to correct them and then mod that up as Informative, Insightful etc.

Another idea is to make down voting cost karma. Stackoverflow does this.

Downvotes not being for disagreement is an absurd redditism. Upvotes are used for agreement, so it is only natural that downvotes are used for disagreement.

PG has stated in the past that downvoting things you disagree with is proper usage on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691

I don't know if 'dang has changed this policy, but if so I haven't heard about it.

I would think that it would be fairly obvious that trying to assert that down-votes are not for disagreement is extremely futile. It's human nature to react to things they disagree with, and if down-votes don't mean disagree... then what? People aren't allowed to disagree? The only way to disagree is to actually invest significant amounts of your time?

Sounds great in theory. But then a small number of zealots can derail just about every thread with minimal effort. I image it would really degrade a community in a heartbeat. So it's probably a good thing nobody has found a way to enforce such a policy.

You can downvote zealotry and flawed arguments without downvoting mundane disagreement.

There are threads where expressing a well formed, well reasoned, well supported but contrary opinion runs the risk of downvotes to greyness. The root of the problem is inevitably that the topic of the thread is a poor fit for HN at that particular point in time [and perhaps always].

A symptom of the problem is that such threads tempt so many people to express their opinion for the sake of expressing it. I get lured in sometimes too. But when I can stop myself, I just flag the thread. And if I need to feel better, maybe I go through and down vote comments I disagree with in lieu of telling people their political, economic, or ethical views are wrong.

That's better than me just adding to the noise and heat and lack of civility. Downvotes are socially acceptable. So are upvotes.

What about topics that are important and relevant to HN but invoke a polarised opinion on HN?

My concerns can be summarized into a single question - If HN had existed historically with the rules as they exist currently, would Georg Cantor have thrived in it?

I flag bad threads. To me if a thread is producing bad behavior then it's bad. Most of the threads that fall into the category of important and bad are posted for discussion elsewhere.

> If HN had existed historically with the rules as they exist currently, would Georg Cantor have thrived in it?

I doubt it. Unconventional ideas that are orders of magnitude less radical than Cantor's get reduced to convention and dismissed all the time on HN. It's dismaying. But it is what human beings do, and especially what human beings in groups do. HN can't change that by proclaiming rules. Maybe we can mitigate it a little, such as by asking people to avoid gratuitous negativity.

I feel like two separate point counters for each post would work best. One for well thought out post, and one for disagreement. They wouldn't affect each others score, and only the positive point counter would determine the ranking of the score.

I agree, I see so many comments downvoted to oblivion simply because the comment betrays a lack of rockstar ninja coding ability even without being egregiously wrong. Downvoting should be reserved for trolling, bullshit, and objectively wrong information.

Also - potentially interesting but controversial threads in which the first post is inevitably blotted out into oblivion. This to me is a sure sign that the fade effect of downvoting doesn't work as intended, either to prevent people from making such comments, or to prevent others from engaging them in conversation by making it slightly difficult to read them.

Ironically this comment has been downvoted a few times. Point made.

EDIT: try giving a reason for downvoting. Apparently opposition to downvoting is not a popular opinion.

I agree about the downvoting. The harm it's doing has increased in recent months, and it's common to see perfectly reasonable satements of fact (much less opinions) that someone else doesn't like be downvoted. It's discouraging to see when it's not even your comment, and really offputting when it is.

It's gotten to a point that I'm not sure downvoting is a net positive for the community any more.

EDIT- example, this comment was downvoted in less than 2 minutes after it was posted. Did this voting improve the conversation or the community?

What did your comment add that the OP or the others replying to the OP didn't state previously?

An "I agree" or "hear, hear" should be downvoted.

He/she added:

- facts are sometimes downvoted - it's gotten worse

I don't like being negative, but if you had actually properly read and comprehended the comment rather than downvoting it, that would have been preferable. In fact this is a perfect example of why downvoting doesn't work properly.

PS, I've upvoted both your comments.

> and it's common to see perfectly reasonable satements of fact (much less opinions) that someone else doesn't like be downvoted.

I don't see why "reasonable statements of fact" being downvoted to be a problem. Something can be a reasonable statement of fact without contributing substantially the discussion. That's a perfectly good reason to dislike it being presented in the context, and a perfectly good reason to downvote it.

pg may have said it is acceptable to use downvotes for disagreement, but that doesn't mean that downvote implies disagreement. Being a fact doesn't, on its own, make something a productive addition to the discussion.

Agreed. I got substantially downvoted for asking (what I thought) was a valid question about a Privacy Policy update. Seems the downvote is being treated more like Reddit.

One thing I like about stackexchange is how downvoting has a cost. I'd like to see downvoting on HN cost the person doing the voting at least 1 karma, maybe 2, maybe even 5 or 10.

yea, that's a good idea. I would back this idea.

It would prevent people from hunting down someone, and downvoting all of the posts without penalty just because they didn't like them.

Though I'm not sure how much of a problem that is here.

A down arrow can mean "I disagree" as well as "this is negative" but in practice the latter is applied (content starts to fade out, etc).

Perhaps instead of a down arrow the icon is a circle with a slash?

Maybe the button icon could be replaced with a word next to the reply link? Kind of as a reminder of what it means?

I have a difference of opinion on the matter of downvotes. A long time ago I decided to try to treat downvotes on my own posts as editorial feedback. In the best case, it just meant I was unclear. In the worst, case I said something stupid. In between there are cases where I knowingly wrote something likely to get downvotes.

I believe downvoting a comment that I disagree with is often far better for HN than expressing my passionate "well informed" opinion. Downvoting prevents my inclination toward "trolling lite" in the form of explaining how someone is obviously wrong for the sake of correcting the internet.

To put it another way, downvotes are for downvoting. Downvoting and moving on is the right choice whenever it proxies the possibility of worse behavior. A downvote can be a way of mocking out a flamewar or general meanness.

Side note: How do I know if someone downvotes my comments? On Reddit it's easy as you can see the score, but here? Am I missing something?

The only way to know is by noticing the comment's score changing.

> Side note: How do I know if someone downvotes my comments? On Reddit it's easy as you can see the score, but here? Am I missing something?

Here, you can see the score on your comments when you are logged in (your comments have a red asterisk and the point score before your name, others comments don't have either feature.) Additionally, if the net moderation is negative (net score is 0 or less, since score starts at 1) for any comment (yours or not) the comment will be greyed (moreso the more negative the moderation is.)

I would like downvoting to require an explanation. It could be a single-line text box with the label "Explain why".

If you're serious about downvoting, it's no trouble to type in a short explanation such as "incorrect", "not funny", "obvious troll", "unnecessarily rude". (Those seem to be some typical reasons for downvotes.)

And if you're not quite sure why you're downvoting, having to explain would certainly serve as a determent.

I don't see an existing problem that this would in any way make better.

Commit logs ask questions without hurting anybody.

If there was ever a psyhotechnological empathic determination of medico-lego "Do No Harm" principles, commit logs are the definition of info emo sec.

Bitcoin/factum public transaction messaging (uncomplete) is also equal to power for votes of parts of speech are important news triggers.

Expressing disagreement is an appropriate use of the down vote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171.

pg a few years back commented: I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

I don't know if he's made another comment on this issue since then.

Shouldn't flagging a post/topic be generally used for a guideline violation?

> Shouldn't flagging a post/topic be generally used for a guideline violation?

Yes.

As I understand it, flagging should be used for egregious violations of the guidelines, but borderline or minor violations, simple lack of substance, or (per pg's comment) perhaps even mere disagreement are suitable uses for downvotes.

I have noticed this too and have a humble suggestion: down-votes should require a comment from the down-voter. This would have the following advantages:

- The extra effort will slow down causal unthoughtful down-votes.

- If there is no justification, the down-voter can be down-voted in turn presumably by a greater degree.

- Any pattern of abuse can easily be seen in user profiles.

Another advantage would be better feedback for the downvoted. Don't knowing why I was downvoted routinely drives me nuts.

I like advantages (1) and (3). I have a bad feeling about (2), however. And there is one immediate disadvantage I can think of: the required comments for down-voting would dilute the average karma, which is important for some people.

One solution is to treat comments that explain down-votes differently than normal comments. That would complicate the system a bit but maybe it will be worth it.

I agree with you. I don't participate enough to be able to have a downvote option but I've seen how a different viewpoint (mainly one that doesn't align with HN demographics) will often get downvoted and, even though this site seems much better than others in that regard, it will still discourage anyone from posting anything they might consider controversial.

Of course, any comment about downvotes is also, understandably, frowned upon and discouraged so there doesn't seem to be much recourse.

We could avoid political or ideological topics altogether but that's very hard considering any conversation can lead to them.

To get back on track, I see it as an extremely hard problem to solve since downvoting due to disagreement is a very big temptation and, once you start, you might not even notice you're doing it anymore.

...and you got downvoted. It's absolutely ridiculous that a forum like HN supposedly frequented by the best and brightest has so many immature children.

I've lost almost all of my karma on this thread and not a single comment as to why I'm being downvoted (-7 points or so). The original article is right that HN has become an incredibly negative community. Downvoting is the internet equivalent of saying "fuck you." So many people want to tell me to shut up but no one will actually say one word why?

From the FAQ:

  Resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Shouldn't there be an exception to that rule? "Unless the original discussion is about downvoting, or about an aspect of HackerNews that would lead to a comment about downvoting being on-topic". Of course, there still needs to be something of substance in the comment.

The comment we're talking about isn't quite substantial. Even the meta-discussion that's happening around most of this stuff isn't all that useful. There have been a lot of people who haven't really gotten the hang of commenting here, complaining about the power of a downvote.

> but no one will actually say one word why?

Here's a word about why. Your comments were rightly downvoted because they didn't contain any information. They lashed out at something you happen to dislike, using phrases like "immature children" that merely vent personal displeasure and offer nothing of value to the community. If HN threads are a swimming pool, that is peeing in it.

HN has a long history of users repeating the same complaints about downvoting. These get downvoted because they lower the signal/noise-ratio. They are such a cliché that the guidelines have for many years contained a rule asking you specifically not to post that kind of comment.

If, instead of familiarizing yourself with any of this and taking your lumps like the rest of us do, you decide to post such things anyway, the only surprise is that they aren't downvoted more.

That, and the inability to change a vote. There are many times I've hit the down arrow when I meant to hit the up arrow. After just one downvote, the comment starts to turn grey, which leads to more downvotes.

I've heard of communities improving when downvoting was added as an option, and deteriorating when downvoting was added as an option. I've also been along for the ride for the former, and then the community revolt when they tried to remove it in a forum upgrade (it was later re-added.)

> It's an awful experience

It can be, if taken the wrong way. It's important to stress that one shouldn't get too freaked out over losing some meaningless internet points over what may have very well been a misclick. Keeping this in mind, it has not been an awful experience for me when I've been downvoted. I wouldn't even say it's been a bad experience for me.

> Most people use to show they disagree with a comment.

I think this is only true when the reasoning or tone is poor - or at least that's the only case the negatives outweigh the positives. I've seen exceedingly few downvotes when I've disagreed and argued here on HN.

As an extreme example, I've seen a thread advocating Cannibalism in a serious tone gain rating, due to it's solid reasoning and proper treatment of the pros and cons of the matter. More typical topics behave similarly - constructive, well reasoned disagreement gains more points than it looses. This on a forum unlike HN - in that, I believe, you could downvote immediately upon account creation.

My experience has been that my comments that are posted to disagree with highly upvoted (often top) comments have been my most upvoted comments. I feel like most people on HN disagree with a comment by upvoting a counterargument, which causes a back-and-forth flow to a thread where the strongest counterargument to each reply is the top child reply. This flow is what often makes threads here great.

I'm actually surprised to see people here complaining about downvotes being used to disagree with comments. A large chunk of HN users can't even downvote. And I can't remember the last time I saw a gray comment that wasn't gray for a really good reason.

> I'm actually surprised to see people here complaining about downvotes being used to disagree with comments.

It is quite common and gets really annoying after a while. Some of my comments in the past have broken the rules. Fine - downvote those. But quite a lot of them have most certainly not, and were written in all earnestness with intention of productive dialogue. And too many of those were still downvoted to a very light shade of grey within 30 minutes of being posted - without a single reply to indicate exactly what anyone's problem with such a post could possibly be, and therefore no hope of improvement (or even any real indication that improvement is needed in the first place).

When I read through threads, I see that I'm not the only one this happens to. And for the record (since this always comes up), no I don't care if they usually get voted back up eventually anyway.

I think it's the greying-out that's the worst. As though the rest of this community needs to be protected from the substance of your post, because a few randoms downvoted your post after they concluded you weren't capitalist enough, or were too capitalist, or think hip new framework X is rubbish, or that a blog post really was just poorly written and not worth reading, etc. It is a subtle aggression perpetrated by the forum software against every user here, and it contributes more to negativity than any single post ever could.

And, it's something that the mods here take special pains to totally ignore even when you bring it up in a direct reply to them discussing meta issues on the forum, multiple times over several months.

> were written in all earnestness with intention of productive dialogue.

That doesn't mean downvotes were for disagreement. Just because you intended it to contribute to productive dialogue doesn't mean that downvoters didn't think that it failed to provide a substantive contribution.

Your argument seems to recognize that people can disagree with you on your message, but seems equally to fail to recognize that people can disagree with you over whether the message was, independent of agreement or disagreement with your point, a substantive contribution.

> It is a subtle aggression perpetrated by the forum software against every user here,

Its not an aggression at all, and, if it was, it would be perpetrated by the downvoters, not the forum software. The only way it can be seen as an aggression by the software (or, more accurately, the forum operator) is if you think you have a right to be protected from seeing (or perhaps having others see) an indication of whether other members of the community think your comment is worthwhile. But that opinion is directly opposed to the entire idea of participating in a public discussion forum.

> That doesn't mean downvotes were for disagreement. Just because you intended it to contribute to productive dialogue doesn't mean that downvoters didn't think that it failed to provide a substantive contribution.

> Your argument seems to recognize that people can disagree with you on your message, but seems equally to fail to recognize that people can disagree with you over whether the message was, independent of agreement or disagreement with your point, a substantive contribution.

Perhaps you started writing your reply before I amended my post to add "without a single reply to indicate exactly what anyone's problem with such a post could possibly be". I do realize that people might not be downvoting for mere disagreement but because they think my post did not contribute to the discussion, however without a reply to elaborate on that, it isn't very helpful. The downvote alone will not usually lead to a correction in behavior, since there is no way for the receiver of the downvote to even know that the downvote was given for that reason as opposed to disagreement, much less what the reason might even be. Instead, he'll conclude that this forum is full of negative people who downvote for specious reasons, or for no reason, and perhaps begin to become a negative HN member himself. That's a loss.

And since your next objection might be that I feel entitled to a reply from everyone who downvotes a post - I don't. But less than one in ten heavily-downvoted posts that I read, has a reply to indicate why that post was downvoted. I feel that number is low.

> Its not an aggression at all, and, if it was, it would be perpetrated by the downvoters, not the forum software.

Well, I don't believe the forum software is actually capable of aggression, heh. What I was getting at, is that it is an act of aggression by the site operators against community members here. And no, I don't have a problem in general with an indication of whether the community thinks a post is worthwhile or not - I do strongly disagree with this particular implementation of it. I would have no problem with, for example, just displaying the raw upvotes and downvotes next to a post.

Like I said, it's as though readers need to be "protected" from reading your post (by making it harder to read), which is patronizing to readers and a bit harsh to the author of the post, considering all it takes is for one random to downvote your post to make it happen. If a post truly is so offensive that people probably shouldn't be made to read it (racial epithets, bullying, etc), we have flag-killing to take care of that.

Greying-out earnest comments merely because they are useless (and remember that's in the best case) is over the line because the consequence of a false positive is too high and the threshold for it to happen (again - one downvote) is too low.

> Perhaps you started writing your reply before I amended my post to add "without a single reply to indicate exactly what anyone's problem with such a post could possibly be".

It is not generally the practice to comment to explain downvotes, and, IMO -- especially given the absence of collapsed threads on HN, but even if it were present -- it would defeat the point of downvoting and decrease the signal-to-noise ratio to do so, as then meta-discussion of the problem with posts would take more real estate, at the expense of the worthwhile discussion of the topic at hand.

> But less than one in ten heavily-downvoted posts that I read, has a reply to indicate why that post was downvoted. I feel that number is low.

I actually feel that that number is too high. If a comment is worth responding to, its probably not worth downvoting, and if it ought to be downvoted, responding is counterproductive.

> Like I said, it's as though readers need to be "protected" from reading your post (by making it harder to read)

Well, yes, the whole point of moderation, community or otherwise, is to suppress content that is outside of what is desired for the forum so as to maintain the character that is intended for the forum.

Put bluntly, censorship based on the community perception of how well posts align with the ideals expressed in the guidelines is the whole purpose of having downvotes. It is, by design, fairly soft censorship that doesn't (through downvotes alone) actually make the content unavailable, but it is exactly to protect the community from the unwanted content interfering with the wanted content.

> which is patronizing to readers and a bit harsh to the author of the post

I don't think its patronizing to the reader to hold out a representation of what the purpose of the forum is and to minimize the visibiity of content that the community has found to be out of line with that purpose. Nor do I find the manner in which HN does it "harsh to the author", despite myself having had many comments go gray -- though far fewer stay there.

In fact, I've often found that a comment going gray triggers my own review and reconsideration, and an edit which makes me happier with the comment. Or results in me deleting a comment which on reflection I realize was ill-considered.

> Greying-out earnest comments merely because they are useless (and remember that's in the best case) is over the line because the consequence of a false positive is too high and the threshold for it to happen (again - one downvote) is too low

I disagree. While its true that a slight greying that lets you know that a comment has been downvoted occurs at a net of one downvote, I don't see that as a "too high" consequence of a false positive. The slight greying at that level doesn't impair readability, and if anything draws more attention to the post. Its only at higher levels of downvoting that there is a substantial negative consequence.

I fail to see the harm you are concerned about here. Perhaps its just being around a long time in online forums, but I think the consequences of no moderation (and voting that doesn't actually reduce the visibility of negatively-voted comments at some point is "no moderation" for this purpose), or of relying primarily on centralized moderation rather than community moderations, are much worse than HN's style of community moderation. And while there are different styles of community moderation (e.g., those used at Slashdot or Reddit), I don't see any clear evidence that they produce better results than HN's.

Well, since you've staked out your reply in direct and total point-by-point opposition to my own, bizarro-world style, there isn't much room for discussion. I will address one thing:

> It is not generally the practice to comment to explain downvotes, and, IMO -- especially given the absence of collapsed threads on HN, but even if it were present -- it would defeat the point of downvoting and decrease the signal-to-noise ratio to do so, as then meta-discussion of the problem with posts would take more real estate, at the expense of the worthwhile discussion of the topic at hand.

I am not suggesting that every single downvote warrants an explanation. I thought that was obvious. But if you look at the two extremes:

* No downvote is ever expanded on in a comment by the downvoter. The site rules themselves will explain some of the downvotes. However, alone they do a poor job of encapsulating what this community considers productive and unproductive discussion. We usually don't know why downvotes are happening. Nothing improves unless mods take direct action to make it happen, as this community has no mechanism for self-regulation.

* Every downvote is explained. I gather you believe this is the worse of the two extremes and I agree. The forum disappears up its own asshole in endless boring meta-discussion and everyone leaves.

Downvotes should be explained sometimes. My one-in-ten figure from before was a total guess. I haven't harvested any data and I don't have any spreadsheets, but I too often see greyed-out posts that I can't for the life of me figure out why they were downvoted. As in, even if I approach it with an unusually high degree of cynicism I still can't guess at a reason. It's gotten to the point that if I see a grey post I'll just automatically upvote it even if I don't read it. I encourage others to do the same.

I disagree, explanation is fundamentally incompatible with the purpose of downvoting. I suppose it would make sense if the explanations were hidden and only made visible to the poster whose comment was downvoted, or by activelt interacting with the downvoted post. Otherwise, its polluting discussion of the topic with meta-discussion, compounding further the problem posed by posts that are downvoted.

Since you're using yourself as a data point, I paged through your comment history looking for your grayed out comments. I have to say that your grayed out comments were all well deserved. They are a very small minority of your comments, but they are comments that generally involved ad hominem attacks and/or gratuitous negativity that did not add to the discussion. I would say the downvote system has worked well in these cases.

Weird. My experience has been the exact opposite. Rarely do I get downvoted for comments merely because people disagree with it. It happens, but often enough for it to be a problem. IMHO, the benefits from seeing unconstructive comments downvoted has been more beneficial than the damage done from the occasional good comment that gets downvoted because someone disagrees.

At the end of the day, a good comment will always get more upvotes based on its perceived quality than downvotes from people mis-using the downvote feature. I credit this to the fact that you only get downvoting privileges at 500 points, at which point, you've been around long enough to have a sense of the HN culture. At 500 points, you feel like you're receiving a great power that comes with great responsibility.

I agree that downvoting is overused, but I don't see it in the guidelines that it should be used only for guideline violations and if that would be true than what is the comment flagging should be used for? Or are they the same? And why is there two ways to mark a comment as negative (downvote and flag) and only one as positive (upvote)?

I guess part of the problem is that there is disagreement about what the down vote is for. I try to think like this: I press the up and down arrows if I think something should be farther up or down on the page. Since the comment score was removed a while back, this approach is now more intuitive. Since I read from the top down, and will stop reading when the comments become uninteresting, it should also produce the desired effect. Whether I disagree with something is orthogonal to whether it is interesting or informative.

I do wish, however, that there were simply two voting options: one for up/down on the page and one for agree/disagree. Just to give us all something to do when we disagree with a comment, other than reply or downvote. It would give "disagree" downvotes their own place and let the other votes dictate a comment display order and user karma. Of course, it would also be interesting to see a user with high karma and high disagree score, for example.

> Negativity isn't the problem--gratuitous negativity is.

Is it just regular negative of me to say statements like that one are horrible, or it is gratuitously negative? Am I being a critical thinker when I say that, whenever I hear people make statement like that one, they are usually weaseling into some businessey doublespeak that roughly translates into "people like me can be negative, people like you cannot, but I refuse to say that outright." Or is that shallow cynicism?

I get your general message, Sam. And while I don't agree with it, I see how enforcing some unwritten "gratuitous negativity" code could improve HN discussions (I just don't think it would). But I do not know of any place on the internet where I find better discussions on daily news; so my opinion: when it's this great already, why do some vague micro-morality-management thing like this to try to change it?

> But I do not know of any place on the internet where I find better discussions on daily news; so my opinion: when it's this great already, why do some vague micro-morality-management thing like this to try to change it?

Well, I know of a place on the Internet where I used to find better discussions: Hacker News. I think Sam is attempting to push HN back toward what it used to be.

In my view, yes, that's shallow cynicism, because it denies good faith in the other.

You may be right that not many places on the internet are better, but HN can and should be much better than it is. Rather than measuring it against rampant internet negativity of today, we should measure it against a future online community where people have learned to refrain from taking their negative feelings out on others.

It no doubt took a long time for people to (mostly) learn how not to do that in person, so it's not surprising if takes us a while to learn not to do it online.

It is cynicism, maybe, but I wouldn't call it shallow or even unwarranted.

> Is it just regular negative of me to say statements like that one are horrible, or it is gratuitously negative?

That is gratuitously negative because you are not contributing anything to the conversation except your opinion. While everyone tends to think their own opinion is an incredibly valuable gift to the world, the world rarely receives it as such.

> Am I being a critical thinker when I say that, whenever I hear people make statement like that one, they are usually weaseling into some businessey doublespeak that roughly translates into "people like me can be negative, people like you cannot, but I refuse to say that outright."

You've taken a simple sentence of a few words, expanded it into a nebulous category of "statement[s] like that one", inferred motivation, and taken it as an assault on "people like you".

That's "critical thinking" if you use the definition of critical meaning "negative" but not the more valuable sort of criticism based on empirical evidence and carefully considered logic.

Now, if you'd presented examples of how previous arguments have been called "gratuitous" but in fact contained substantial contributions in terms of facts and logic, or vice versa, because of the status of the individuals involved, then you would have a real argument rather than just a vague expression of cynicism, and I for one would not call that "gratuitous negativity".

>That is gratuitously negative because you are not contributing anything to the conversation except your opinion.

That doesn't explain at all why something would be "gratuitously negative".

I can contribute my opinion that the sky is blue and provide no evidence or arguments. But if I only say "The sky is blue," and nothing else, then it doesn't look like I'm being "gratuitously negative".

My apologies. The question was asking if this statement was "gratuitously negative" or just "regular negative", so I thought we could take its negativity for granted.

I would tend to agree with the original commenter that "horrible" is a negative word, and with you that "blue" is not. I hope that clears it up.

It's fine. I was being overly-pedantic. :)

First and foremost, I would like to have a friendly laugh at you deriding opinions, then following it up with a long post of your opinions.

But I don't have any criticism of what you said simply because it is your opinion. In fact, I (and many HNers) value the opinions of others (critical or otherwise), especially those of people who are especially intelligent or experienced. If opinions were worthless, the world would be stagnant. Great companies and great science has been done utilizing nothing more than opinions (one great scientist used his opinion that "God does not play dice with the universe" to drive his research).

Secondly, the quote I took can very reasonably be taken as the most important statement Sam made, and a statement on which the rest of his article depends on. I didn't infer motivation, though I did use anecdotes from my life experience (i.e. the empirical evidence you accuse me of lacking) to inform the way in which I interpret statements that follow the "morally speaking, x is good, but excessive x is bad" logical structure (which, no shit "[bad adjective] x is bad" is virtually a tautology).

And I'm sorry, but I have no clue what your last sentence has to do with anything. Sam presented zero examples of posts that are "gratuitously" negative, let alone numbers that support that this gratuitous negativity is rampant. Nevertheless, I do believe him that there is more ill-natured criticism than is ideal (mostly because every single community, online or otherwise, has this characteristic). Just his opinion that there is too much of the wrong type of criticism, and some information that he will be doing something about it. I offered another opinion that some others seem to share.

He is right though, I also think your post was a perfect example of gratious negativity. However as this shows, it needs exceptional people with a high level of self reflection and lots of practice at discussions to even realize what is and isnt gratious negativity. For that reason I dont think this new rule will have any effect on this site because there are simply not enough people to vote according to this new rule and punish people who violate it.

Even if we do explain to you how your comment was gratiously negative, you will simply not agree and that's that. There won't be any tangible consequences to your disagreement and therefore you won't change. I think this is the core problem of online discussions: Without consequences, people dont change. This is also why sites like Stackoverflow work well: It has (positive) consequences if you contribute well. (="internet points") but it's easier there because those are purely technical discussions with clear goals and non-goals.

Life isn't so focussed in non-technical areas. So let's take your comment: You start with saying "statements like these are horrible" which is a personal opinion of yours without any backing evidence which you START with. So you start with something unsubstantiated and yet it's already very negative. In the real world this would more obviously be seen as poor social skills: Dont just start out a discussion by saying the other guy's opinion is horrible and then later on "maybe" add some points to underline that. Make your points FIRST and then at the end with a large disclaimer say your personal opinion if you really have to. Imagine every comment here to be a job interview. You wouldnt talk with adjectives like "horrible" at your interview. It's inprecise, it's pointless. You would instead say "statements like these are a little too inprecise because it's hard to qualify what is and isnt 'gratious' negativity." See how I completely omitted the word "horrible" yet the message was unchanged, no even better: the message has now more substance at the same wordcount. NOW I think you know what is meant by gratious negativity. Things that add wordcount without adding substance - yet being negative at the same time. As another poster has pointed out, there should and can be a similar rule about positivity.

I know it's just a minor mistake, but you have no idea how amusing it is to see a highly pedantic person try to insult me WRT to my ability to communicate correctly, while referring to my negativity as "gratious[1]."

As far as the rest of your post goes, communication isn't just a series of code comments for everyone in this world. If every post were subjected to some Critical Thinking 101 interpretation of logic, we'd never get anywhere. If I wanted to be an ass, I could destroy your message citing dozens of logical fallacies, but that's pointless. You have your way of writing and speaking. And that's cool. I respect that. And I don't think it would be fair of me to subject you to some diatribe about what you could do to improve in my eyes, because we are obviously both literate enough to know the consequences of writing/speaking in the manner we do.

I know what I said and how I said it, and a lot of people have agreed with it. If my caustic tone is too much of a hurdle to get over, then down vote me all you want. I'm saying what I'm saying directly to Sam Altman. I'm using my real name. There is a decent chance that at some point in my life, Sam could be a benefit to me, and I choose to communicate with him, negatively or positively, in the most effective manner that I know how, even if you think you know of more effective ways.

[1] Gratious: An obsolete spelling of gracious

I think every discussion is a series of code and whether you want to "write clean code" with other people or not shows the value you have for other people. You call it pedantic in the same way that a disorganized person calls an organised person pedantic for making that extra effort. Ask yourself why I should spend my time reading your comments when you yourself have admitted that you dont think every post you write should be subjected to critical thinking 101. Why should anyone? Unless you think our time is not valuable. I am this direct with you because you seem to want to be effective, but I believe you are not.

I know that's what you think. At some point, you picked up a very linear path in life, and you think any deviation from that line constitutes some form of imperfection. It's why you're probably great at coding or math, but suffer in some other areas of life.

Why should you listen to someone who doesn't write like a robot? For one, it is boring to listen to people who communicate that way. Read some Gaddis or Pynchon. Read XKCD. Listen to music from all eras and cultures. Hell, listen to a joke, or watch a stupid cat video, or go skiing, or fuck a pretty girl, or a guy, or try some peyote. Life is filled with sensory perceptions that are worthwhile outside of the context of accumulation of knowledge or money or whatever you're optimizing for.

I choose to speak the way I do because I would rather risk alienating people like you by being myself than to allow the world to mold me based on some ill-informed[1] perception of what I think the other people in this world are like.

[1] Which, I guarantee, you and me and everyone we know are ill-informed on this topic.

So you come here to experience life and socialise while others come here to get help at solving problems and keep up to date with the competition. Judging from the OP's submission I think we would all like to see more focus on friendly, factual feedback instead of gossip like discussions centered around personal opinions.

> I choose to speak the way I do because I would rather risk alienating people like you by being myself than to allow the world to mold me based on some ill-informed[1] perception of what I think the other people in this world are like.

This very admirable and evident in this comment thread. I don't agree with everything you've been saying, but the sense of genuiness found in the way you've expressed yourself here is refreshing and very much appreciated. It saddens me that all I see in response are pleas for you to censor yourself. I already see the effects of the anti-negativity community thought police...

Admist the downvotes, know that your words have not fallen entirely on deaf ears.

Thanks bud. It is appreciated.

> Is it just regular negative of me to say statements like that one are horrible, or it is gratuitously negative?

If you'd just said that, I'd say "regular negative", but also non-constructive and useless and the kind of thing I'd downvote for being non-constructive. But when you go one with this:

...you aren't engaging with the idea that you are responding to, but making an unsubstantiated generalization that is worse than even just directly inventing a motivation to ascribe to the author of the idea you are responding to, because you are instead doing so for other people and using it a base for a guilt by association attack on the author of the idea you are responding to rather than engaging with the merits of the idea itself.

> Or is that shallow cynicism?

At best.

This is exactly my concern, fortunately stated better than I could have myself.

It's "the programmers way" to try to come up with some sort of moderation/policing system to solve this. Please do not come up with a moderation system.

There should simply be a confirmation step after hitting submit, reminding the poster that they are valued for their positive contribution and giving the poster the chance to rethink their post and cancel if its too negative. Additionally when posting, require people to self-rate the level of negativity of their post when they submit from one to ten. Publish that number along with the post.

There's nothing at the moment that explicitly asks or reminds people of expectations when they post. What is it that makes you think posters know there is an expectation not to be negative? People don't read the community guidelines every time they post, UNLESS key points of the guidelines are presented to them.

The community moderation system, what it ends up being, will be gamed and abused and alienate and anger people. Don't do it. Witness the toxic mess of StackOverflow.

HN is not in a position right now to express concern about negative posts because it is not explicitly asking people to avoid negative posting, at the time that they post, and requiring the user to think about it. That is step one.

HN would be implementing a passive-aggressive solution by going to an indirect system that continues to allow people to post negatively and then gets the community to police it later. Address it up-front, at the time of posting. Let people be responsible for their own posts. Asked to think it through, posters will dial back the negativity.

> There's nothing at the moment that explicitly asks or reminds people of expectations when they post.

New users are asked to read the guidelines when they post. I don't know how long that reminder stays there, but there's a linkto the guidelines right under the text entry box.

Some background document doesn't address the users present behaviour. If there is some critical behaviour you want reinforced then you can't hand wave vaguely at some background document. You need to drive people through a process that requires them to confirm that are behaving in the expected way.

"How negative is this post?" 0: not negative 10: it's snarky

Thanks for this, it's a good idea getting people to rate how negative their comments are... it would certainly be an interesting exercise, although it may just show that those who leave negative comments don't think they are being negative, whereas the people that can be bothered rating the negativity of others are probably more sensitive to negativity.

Self-rating the negativity of your comment is designed to force you to acknowledge that HN wants you to think and be reasonable.

The OP's blog post suggests that "Gentle reminders by peers" will make the culture better. I think these gentle reminders by peers in practice will whip everyone into a frenzy of hunting for negativity, naming negativity, blaming for negativity, being defensive about negativity, judging and feeling judged, anger, outrage and despair with constant accusations and counter accusations about the definition of negativity.

Some negativity is normal and natural and okay. HN wants less of it, so they should just ask people to make their own self assessment of their post at the moment of posting. Problem mostly solved, but it's pointless to try to completely solve it - the concept of negativity is open to interpretation and therefore everyone will have a different opinion.

I think plenty of people will tone it back after being forced to judge their own negativity.

Negativity is only bad if it's used to speak for other's feelings. You actually don't know if it will whip everyone into a frenzy. :)

Reading through this thread shows quite a few people in a frenzy about negativity.

The community moderation system, what it ends up being, will be gamed and abused and alienate and anger people. Don't do it. Witness the toxic mess of StackOverflow.

It seems like the reason HN will come up with a new moderation system is because dang isn't going to stay moderator for the rest of his life.

I sometimes feel bad HN has claimed so much of his time. It must be at least slightly depressing to constantly deal with the worst parts of HN. We should send him a thank-you card or a cake or something.

There are other candidates for moderator, of course, but would they be as thoughtful? As careful? Will they have the presence of mind to avoid hellbanning people if it would make the HN mod team appear in a bad light, as in this very comment section? (The squabble near the top of this post was HN at its worst, but dang probably couldn't ban anyone involved without giving the wrong impression.)

One thing's for sure: A community moderation system definitely won't. But a community moderation system might be a better alternative to a careless moderator, since at least the poor decisions can be appealed.

But that would probably be the first time in the history of the internet that something like that worked. So hopefully it will work.

If not, I imagine the HN team will do what they've always done: undo the bad decision and think of something else. They're nothing if not persistent and creative.

I'm very glad to see this idea turning into a community mechanism. HN has some great minds, and I love seeing the solutions they come up with to problems. It's a very technical, analytical, and rational community.

Unfortunately, some of the qualities that make a good technical problem solver can also lead to nitpikcing. It feels like trying to find the bugs in an argument. That can be useful, but only when it ties to the core idea rather than some tangential point. Top comments often sound like, "Well, technically, you're wrong on this one unimportant fact you mentioned briefly."

I'm glad HN is taking steps to ensure that feedback is constructive.

Bear in mind that what is and isn't constructive is not an objective measurement. It's a subjective value judgment. To some, finding bugs in someone's argument is a constructive thing - you are helping them by fixing their argument and showing them how to argue better in the future. Being better able to argue means an increased ability to communicate effectively with others.

So my question becomes thus: how do you define constructive? I, personally, have run across multiple instances of one person's constructive and actionable feedback being another's gratuitously negative useless nitpicky feedback.

Maybe a good rule is: the smaller the pedantic, nitpicky detail you address in your feedback, the more you should include other details as well. Instead of "this is wrong because detail X" say something like "this handles detail Y well and I think detail Z is clever, but detail X is wrong".

I think your ideas are good and your intentions are laudible, but I question what purpose is served in asking people to wade through excessive verbiage in order to arrive at what could otherwise be concise and direct criticism.

The idea is to give the reader a more complete picture. Often we skip over what we think is good about something and focus on the problems. I'm not saying you should come up with feel-good bullshit to make something fundamentally flawed seem like a good idea. I'm just saying that, when something is "mostly good but with one problem" we can learn just as much from why it's "mostly good" as we can from what the problem is.

I was attempting to give a demonstration of where notions of completeness-of-feedback such as this can lead by wrapping what could have been a concise point in needless verbose complexity. I am reminded of "How To Make Friends And Influence People", where it is advised that any criticism be couched in complements because people are easily manipulated by the positive emotional rush of a complement.

I'd like to think that such wrapping isn't needed on HN, and people are able to separate ideas or code from themselves for the purpose of accepting useful feedback. It is possible that this assumption is incorrect and should be abandoned, as people often have difficulty separating the two.

I find that I do not agree that positive feedback is as useful as negative feedback. Being told you are right certainly feels much better and is much kinder to the ego we all seek to stroke, but it is in being told you are wrong where is opportunity for growth lies. If we're clever, we can even manage to learn from the mistakes of others and avoid them ourselves. I am uncertain that forcing a "more complete" consideration of issues that are in the main not relevant is likely to improve the level of discourse or utility of feedback.

I'm going to avoid the issue of one person's fatal flaw being another's useless nitpick - it'll come up next time someone tries to be clever with crypto anyway.

I think some examples might be helpful. I would consider a gratuitously negative comment to be some variation of "That's a dumb idea" with no elaboration, or an ad hominem, and such comments are pretty much always downvoted already.

Exactly. I would help me a lot to understand what they are aiming for, especially because I'm not a native English speaker.

Here's a few examples I know of:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9015734

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8938409

The first link is a low-quality comment / ad hominem, the second link is off-topic / ad hominem. Both of those were already against the rules.

That's true. (See "Sharp readers may point out" in the OP!) But the guidelines are not a technical spec, and some redundancy is helpful.

Indeed. Sam pointed that out in his post:

Sharp readers may point out that the HN guidelines have always excluded those things. That's true. But it's still enough of a problem in HN threads that this is a clarification worth making. We tried it out last year when we released special guidelines for Show HNs. It worked well there, so we're extending it to the whole site.

You'll have to trust me when I say that what I'm about to write isn't personal. I have no idea what was going on in your head or heart when you wrote it and don't want to invent a story about your motivations. :)

> The first link is a low-quality comment / ad hominem, the second link is off-topic / ad hominem. Both of those were already against the rules.

Although I wouldn't call this comment "gratuitously negative" or even "negative," I do believe it exemplifies one of the major root behaviors that lead to negativity (gratuitous or otherwise): failure to fully digest the conversation plus a reflexive desire to make a point.

First, as @dang pointed out elsewhere, this comment's point was anticipated and addressed directly in the original post:

> Sharp readers may point out that the HN guidelines have always excluded those things. That's true. But it's still enough of a problem in HN threads that this is a clarification worth making. We tried it out last year when we released special guidelines for Show HNs. It worked well there, so we're extending it to the whole site.

Even if the point were worth making, it was already made by @sama. Why assume the grandparent comment wasn't written with that very paragraph in mind? If you didn't read all of the original essay, why jump in to comment on whether the examples were appropriate or not?

Second, even if that paragraph weren't there, comments like this add absolutely nothing constructive to the conversation and risk starting an irrelevant debate over the semantics of "gratuitously negative" vs. "ad hominem" vs. "off-topic". Much more constructive would be, "When @sama said 'gratuitously negative' I was thinking more of comments like: <links to some comments>. To me these are different from the examples you listed because <reasons>."

Don't have any examples in mind? Don't have time to go look for them? That's fine — don't comment!

Honestly, I'd bet money that @sama added that paragraph specifically in an attempt to head off pointless top-level comments like, "Isn't this already against the rules? Look, here they are: Rule 3, Rule 14, and Rule 78(b)! Does @sama even read the rules of his own site? UGH."

All of these things pile up, leading to people responding reflexively to other people, who respond reflexively in turn, leading to...etc. etc.

I wasn't trying to make a point?

The original comment was "how is this different from ad hominems?" and the reply with examples of gratuitous negativity were ad hominems, which was contradictory so I elaborated to see if anyone could provide more context, which dang did. (Yes, I missed the intent of the paragraph in the original submission at first.)

There are obviously bad comments, which most people agree are inappropriate but I think the problem is that there are another set of comments that the HN team thinks is inappropriate but a significant portion of commenters think is clearly okay.

So I think informative examples would point out comments that many people think are okay but that the HN team does not.

Someone writes a detailed technical blog post and submits it.

A few comments are about the content of the post.

And then someone makes a comment about the blog CSS or the framework or javascript, wothout mentioning any content of the blog.

I get the impression that HN doesn't want those type of comments here.

I very much doubt that is the main category of comment that the new rule is addressing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9236332

Here's the example I was thinking of.

Isn't some cynicism necessary to balance out herd-like behavior? Doesn't cynicism help to temper what may otherwise become a rah-rah echo chamber? To me, this policy seems like a way to squash otherwise-potentially-valid criticism--or cynicism (perhaps of startup culture itself, due to Y-combinator's interest in startup culture continuing). Under the new policy, my comment could be considered gratuitously negative, no? Even though it's designed to spark an honest debate.

Is it? I've always thought of cynicism as a terrible thing. You don't need to be "distrustful of human integrity and sincerity" in order to disagree with someone.

For whatever its worth, I don't see this comment as "gratuitously negative". You're not posting just to get a rise, you're leaving people with something substantive to reply to by way of expanding on your viewpoint (a "this sucks" comment doesn't do that).

"Under the new policy, my comment could be considered gratuitously negative, no?"

No, your comment would be fine. The idea is, if you're going to be negative, at least be thoughtful about how you want to say it. Looking at it a different way, if you're negative, do you take the pleasure from being honest or from being dramatic? If you take pleasure from being honest, there's nothing stopping you from being both honest and welcoming. If you want to be dramatic, do it as a joke, but don't do it to boost your ego, and go after the idea rather than the person. There are ways to have your cake and eat it.

> Isn't some cynicism necessary to balance out herd-like behavior?

No. In fact, cynicism can be a herd-like behavior.

> Doesn't cynicism help to temper what may otherwise become a rah-rah echo chamber?

No, it doesn't. It might add another problem on top, but that doesn't actually make things better.

> To me, this policy seems like a way to squash otherwise-potentially-valid criticism

If it is valid, on-topic criticism, it isn't gratuitous negativity.

> or cynicism

Discouraging plain cynicism as distinguished from reasoned criticism is, IMO, a positive benefit.

> Under the new policy, my comment could be considered gratuitously negative, no?

I don't see how.

>If it is valid, on-topic criticism, it isn't gratuitous negativity.

We'll need some assurance that invalid criticism can also fall under the category of "not gratuitously negative" as well. Otherwise, we've just defined "invalid" criticism as being against the rules. And strangely, the people in power are always the ones whose viewpoints are "valid", "true", etc.

The English would tackle this problem by asking people to be nice. The Americans would tackle this by policing, punishment and penalties. The cold war communists of the 1950s by forcing the community to watch each other and report offenders.

I like you. Let's be friends.

Reminds me of this shirt[1] from Casanovas in Makawao, HI:

Heaven is where the police are British, the chefs are Italian, the Mechanics German, the lovers French and it is all organized by the Swiss.

Hell is where the police are German, the chefs British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss and it is all organized by the Italians.

[1] http://www.happyhotelier.com/2008/06/01/quote-of-the-day-no-...

I really like Recurse Center's (formerly Hacker School) social rules: https://www.recurse.com/manual#sub-sec-social-rules

They address some non-obvious behaviors that tend to stunt conversation. It'd be nice to see some of those guidelines bleed over into the HN community.

The first three rules are fine, but the fourth ("No subtle -isms") strikes me as rather hypocritical given the Recurse Center's policy of offering financial support only to favored minorities. They write [1]

We want the Recurse Center to be a space with as little bigotry as possible in it.

and yet their financial aid policies are explicitly discriminatory [2]:

The Recurse Center is free for everyone, and we offer need-based living expense grants for women and people from racial and ethnic groups traditionally underrepresented in programming.

In other words, poor white and Asian men can attend, but they don't qualify for any extra support. This is an "ism", but there's nothing subtle about it.

[1]: https://www.recurse.com/manual#no-subtle-isms

[2]: https://www.recurse.com/diversity

What does your opinion about Recurse's financial aid program have to do with whether their community guidelines are good? Either the isms rule is good or it isn't; its validity does not depend on you agreeing with the rest of their actions.

Their guidelines are hypocritical, i.e., bad. To spell it out explicitly: the -isms rule is probably fine as far as it goes, but if HN is going to be inspired by the Recurse Center's policies, it should go a step further and officially discourage the Recurse Center's brand of pious discrimination as well.

How could this sentiment possibly have anything to do with Hacker News? Much to my disappointment, Hacker News doesn't offer financial aid to commenters.

Maybe that basic income, basic speechcome, could help make some sense of logic pains.

Assuming that you actually want to understand my position, I'll expand my answer one more time. You don't need to agree with me to see that my view has nothing to do with the literal-minded (and admittedly amusing) observation that "Hacker News doesn't offer financial aid to commenters."

The Recurse Center's guideline against "subtle -isms" takes place in the context of offering financial aid only to favored groups. This suggests that "subtle -isms" against less-favored groups might be policed less vigorously. For example, many ordinary white men might reasonably consider the term "underrepresented" itself to be a "subtle -ism", but I doubt complaints to this effect would fall on sympathetic ears.

This issue applies to Hacker News because being inspired by the Recurse Center's policies risks importing the expectation that "avoid subtle -isms" mainly applies to speech against their favored groups. If Hacker News is to adopt Recurse Center–style community guidelines but wants to avoid such bias, it should be explicit in disclaiming any notion of "protected classes", instead insisting that the guidelines be applied equally to all groups.

Their behavior (in having a racist and sexist policy) serves to subtly redefine their community guidelines. This type of hypocrisy leads to redefining of rules the same way the Seven Commandments in Animal Farm evolved.

This post[0] from the Advocate has a great line that is relevant here. The current dialogue around diversity "...propagates something harmful: the idea that gender is simply the lack of maleness, race a lack of whiteness, sexuality a lack of gayness."

When someone establishes rules and does not adhere to those rules, they end up redefining the words in those rules until they no longer carry the literal meaning they once did.

The policy reads:

    Our last social rule bans subtle racism, sexism, homophobia, 
    transphobia, and other kinds of bias.

... but now means:

    Our last social rule bans subtle racism (except against white 
    people), sexism (except against cisgender men), homophobia, 
    transphobia, and other kinds of bias (except any bias against 
    white cisgender men).

The experience of that individual from the Advocate demonstrates that terms like diversity, racism, sexism and bias are being warped and redefined by society to allow for exceptions that don't include white, straight, cisgender men (and Asian men in the context of engineering).

Language evolves, and the actions of people can shape how it evolves.

[0] http://www.advocate.com/politics/commentary/2011/01/20/im-wh...

Looks like I was wrong in my other post[0] in this thread about people using downvotes to moderate posts they merely disagree with. Apparently those interested in intersectionality, refuse to consider the possibility that discrimination against white cisgender males and asian cisgender men is a thing.

Don't get me wrong here. I'm not anti-diversity. I'm actually a huge proponent of diversity. I just believe that hypocrisy and reserve discrimination is the wrong way to get there. And I believe that there are many more dimensions in which someone can contribute to the diversity of a group besides gender, race and sexual identity. Cognitive and cultural diversity for example are examples of two other vectors in which someone can contribute to diversity. What happened to MLK's dream of focusing on content of character instead of color of a person's skin? At the end of the day characteristics of like gender, race and identity are merely a few of the many factors that contribute to the sum total of experiences that makes someone who they are and who they will be become. The are just superficial proxies for the type of diversity we should be seeking out and celebrating and that's diversity of content of character.

What kind of message are we sending our kids when things like this can happen:

    Last year, his school offered a robotics class for girls 
    only. When my son asked why he couldn't join, it was 
    explained to him that girls need special help to become 
    interested in technology, and that if there are boys 
    around, the girls will be too scared to try.

    My son came home very confused. You see, he grew up with a 
    mom who coded while she breastfed and brought him to his 
    first LUG meeting at age seven weeks. The first time he 
    saw a home-built robot, it was shown to him by a local 
    hackerspace member, a woman who happens to administer one 
    of the country's biggest supercomputers. Why was his  
    school acting like girls were dumb?

    Thanks so much, modern-day "feminism", for putting very 
    unfeminist ideas in my son's head. [2]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9319641

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality

[2] http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/girls-and-software

I like the rule "no feigning surprise". "No well-actually's" and "No back-seat driving" to me seem designed to help the linear flow of IRL interaction. But in a threaded discussion forum like HN, the important main thread can still go on unimpeded despite "no well-actually" side-notes.

The "no-subtleisms" rule is designed to hinder the spread of information about the differences of different groups. "It's so easy my grandmother could do it" is supposedly bad because it reminds us that there is a group, old people, who are not like us. Focusing on differences can create a hostile us-vs-them climate. But it can also remind us that there is a world outside of SV. That there are other people with other abilities and skills, with other problems that need solving. In this particular case it can remind us that if we want to target old people with a product, to make sure it is easy to use.

Do you also make sure a product targeted towards women is especially easy to use? Saying "But older people really ARE less competent and I'm just trying to help them" is still ageist.

If you want to specify that something is usable by people with, say, "age related disabilities", great! But don't use "being a grandmother" as a synonym for that.

One simple thing that I've found to help me write comments of all types in a positive and unoffensive manner is to simply proof read the comment before posting. I re-read all of my comments aloud in my head, and make necessary adjustments before hitting the submit button.

I find that emotion and enthusiasm can lead to gratuitous negativity without even realizing it, as those things don't always translate well to plain text. Aside from posts, this applies to emails and texts.

Since I started this, I am almost never accused of coming across in a negative tone, even when I want to convey disappointment or other negative emotions. There's usually always a way to craft it so that it's perceived as constructive criticisms, and thus, well received.

Write with emotion, and proof read without.

As a bonus, I rarely make spelling or grammatical errors, except occasionally out of ignorance.

Yes! And if, like me, you tend to see what you should have edited out only submitting it, there is a handy "delay" parameter in your profile. (Though kogir will smite me for mentioning it.)

The problem is that "shallow cynicism", "gratuitous negativity", and "all forms of meanness" are vague distinctions all subject to interpretation.

Guidelines like this should have specific examples to aid in their definitions so we can criticize or agree with them. What could be considered "mean" to someone emotional/thin skinned, might be interpreted as helpful criticism to someone not so sensitive.

Sometimes it's really hard to say something respectfully negative (oxymoron), and even harder for it to be interpreted as respectful. I, for one, appreciate when people talk trash to me (especially when I'm wrong). It's an awakening I sometimes don't get from a less firm/colorful counterargument.

As a counterpoint: The more specific your guidelines are the more you have people who will attempt to abuse them pedantically (see reddit for so many examples). They will also become rules, rather than guidelines. I think the idea may be that they want the community to use these as guidelines and interpret them as appropriate to keep the site mature and pointed in the right direction.

This is just a terrible idea. Will I have this comment flagged for expressing this?

A thought experiment. If you and some others are in a car, and it's just driven off a cliff, and as you are falling you say to the other occupants, "We've just driven off a cliff! Lets open the door and get out of here!" is that gratuitous negativity? No, it's the truth.

Most people, in this car, don't want to hear the truth. As they say, ignorance is bliss. Stop being so negative! Saying we've driven off a cliff is getting me down! So shutup!

The thing is, reality is not all sunshine and rainbows. There are some very hard realities unfolding in the world right now. Remove the ability to make negative comments and now you can't criticise things. The car driving off the cliff is a metaphor for our society which now openly tortures, wages a never ending false war on terror, and is a government of wolves that's using incrementalism to roll out a police state. We double tap drone strike weddings, we snoop on every communication on the planet. And when it's found out, absolutely nothing changes, because we are already captured. We are already prisoners.

This is not negativity. This is reality. This is the truth. Some people, when faced with this, want to shake people, wake them up and say 'lets fix this'. But most want to bury their head in the sand. They want to gag the words. They want to shoot the messenger. And then go back to sleep in their ivory tower, hoping that they will die of old age before the consequences really come home to roost.

For a group of supposedly smart people, this is incredibly dumb. I've just finished reading Foucault's "Discipline and Punish" to try and get a better understanding of the societal structure of prisons and punishment to better understand the times I live in. And most of what's in that book would be deemed by a lot of people here as 'gratuitous negativity'. And yet Foucault was one of the great minds of our time. Under this guideline his ideas are no longer welcome. And so it goes.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” ― George Orwell

Please correct me if I am wrong, but the way I read the OP was that negativity without reason is one part of the issue.

In your case of the car falling off a cliff, perhaps it is gratuitous negativity to say "We've just driven off a cliff! Lets open the door and get out of here!" but it's not gratuitous negativity to say "We've just driven off a cliff! Lets open the door and get out of here because this car is falling towards the ground at high speed due to gravity and motion and we're all about to die!"

I think if there is at least some reasoning shown with the negativity, the argument is more clear and others can learn from it.

Again, I could have misunderstood both the OP and your comment, if so I apologize.

In my experience, even when you describe the gravity and the impending impact, you are still seen as being negative. I think it has less to do with logic, and more to do with evolutionary biases. Mainly in-group/out-group bias (for instance nationality, or brand allegiance) or avoiding cognitive dissonance (If I accept your point, that means I have to change my view of the world to a more uncomfortable position).

You know what, I think this is a good idea. I definitely get into "I'm the world's biggest asshole today" mode too frequently. Maybe if I get called out on it more it'll help make me a better person. I know the rest of the civil discourse rules here on HN have helped me become more thoughtful in other modes of interaction.

> I definitely get into "I'm the world's biggest asshole today" mode too frequently.

No you don't.

Well, at least we can always kaizen our way to betterment?

I suppose adding the guideline can't hurt, because it might at least make people more strongly consider their comments before posting them. Unfortunately, reasonable people can disagree about where the threshold is between appropriate skepticism/criticism and gratuitous negativity. Since "gratuitous" means unjustified or inappropriate, it by definition should be avoided. The trick is figuring out which things are inappropriate. Hopefully most of you judge this comment to be on the good side of the fence. :)

Right. Trolls aside, everyone thinks their negativity is completely appropriate...

You're right. A corollary is that gratuitous negativity is largely unintentional. That's why we're asking community members to be more active in gently reminding each other when the line is being crossed. Gently!

What line? It's so bloody arbitrary as to be a useless guideline. It's about as meaningful as 'be nice'.

Virtually all communication is open to interpretation. Focus on what you know. Can you tell the difference between constructive criticism and destructive criticism? Can you appreciate the difference in motives? If you can, then you'll basically know everything you need to know in order to understand what's being asked for.

Be nice is a good guideline. I try to be nice.

From the OP:

Negativity isn't the problem--gratuitous negativity is. By that we mean negativity that adds nothing of substance to a comment. This includes all forms of meanness.

That's enough for reasonable people to get the idea. Trying to force precision here would take us down a rabbit hole.

I think reasonable people can disagree about what adds substance to a comment.

Oh, no question. But by "getting the idea" I mean the intent. Reasonable people are always going to differ on the precise meaning of these terms. That doesn't need to be a problem. If everyone makes a good-faith effort to avoid gratuitous negativity however they best understand that, HN will be fine.

I agree. The primary benefit is not to establish objective decidable rules, but rather to remind people to try to be genuine and fair.

>But by "getting the idea" I mean the intent.

I'm suspicious of the intent. That's why I want a more formal criteria.

I don't know of any way to formalize things like this and am skeptical that it's doable. Simple principles, plus a request to the community to do its sincere best with them, seem likely to produce the best outcome.

Your comment is bad and you should feel bad. :)

Niceness/meanness is more often than not entirely subjective, relative, and arbitrary. Trying to create an objective definition for a subjective concept is going to end in frustration for a lot of people.

Personally, I started frequenting HN mostly because the community was not only smaller, but also more up-front about its opinions. I've come to expect and appreciate a blunt, direct criticism from the folks here, and would hate to see even the harsher end of that go away. The Theo de Raadts and Linus Torvadses of the world say "mean" things sometimes, but 93.8% of the time, those "mean" things need to be said.

I've realized whenever someone uses a smiley face it's when they have their teeth bared and ready to bite, almost without exception

Really? No cases of it being used to denote happy sarcasm? How peculiar.

> Unfortunately, reasonable people can disagree about where the threshold is between appropriate skepticism/criticism and gratuitous negativity.

Reasonable people can disagree about the boundaries of most things in the existing guidelines. But the guidelines aren't intended as behavior definitions for a computing system, there met as guidelines to be applied by humans to a human community, so fuzzy boundaries are normal, and trying to create excessively crisp boundaries for that task is usually counterproductive.

There is nothing to worry about. I do think it is indicative of a certain kind of new diversity friendly, "safe space", slightly censorious attitude which is rooted in normal human group psychology, keeping the tribe safe and secure and also swayed by whatever flavour of popular radical politics is operating at the time. It's nothing new. I wouldn't worry about this affecting Hacker News but if it does, we will notice the discussions becoming stilted, people will self-censor and there will emerge other places where people can feel more comfortable with their own voices. We are far from that day. That day might not ever come, HN is too small in my opinion.

I wonder though - how (if we take it to unlikely worst case scenario) would it affect how the behaviour of certain well known personalities such as Richard Stallman, or Linus Torvalds is viewed in the future where any form of negativity is censored against?

Does that even follow, though? HN's community has traditionally (thankfully!) flatly rejected the "safe space" PC game whenever it's attempted to be played here, either in the comments or the submissions.

Remember that the guideline is against "gratuitous negativity", not "negativity" in general. HN will still be a place where actual crap gets called crap, but hopefully this means that we'll see less middlebrow criticism and more actually substantive comments.

> HN will still be a place where actual crap gets called crap

I daresay that this is the problem. When one has the option to say "I think this isn't good from perspective X, because of thing Y", and one says "this is crap", one is being unconstructive and mean.

To say that something that someone did or thought is "crap" or "rubbish", the way I see it, is just needlessly inflammatory. I think a lot of people conflate being inflammatory with being frank and straightforward. "Look at how non-PC I am, I told it like it is!!"

The truth is option A above is just as frank, but much more civil, and isn't creating enmity when there isn't cause for any.

I was purposefully using "crap" as shorthand, there :)

In detail, I don't see HN ever being a place where legitimate (in other words, well articulated) criticism gets deflected or discouraged on the grounds of being mean or unfriendly. At the end of the day, if you have learned something factual about what you've done, it should not be discarded just because the usual social niceties were not provided.

Think of a Show HN post for an obviously slapdash and insecure web service of some kind. I'd fully expect the comments to contain almost nothing but proclamations of how the author is doing it wrong.

I don't know about that, I think it's an increasingly small minority who have been calling out recent PC submissions and ideas.

Feels like the conflict of interest of a general news forum being run by an investment firm with PR interests is beginning to rear its ugly head.

This isn't a general news forum. The history of this board is not one of general news but items of specific interest and relevance to startups.

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You may be describing what the board /should/ be, or what it set out to be, but judging by the threads actually being upvoted by users, you are incorrect. We've seen everything from tech pieces to startup culture threads to general interesting news being upvoted to the main page.

One needn't look far to find out exactly what HN set out to be: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html. It's interesting how much of that language was copied into the current guidelines wholesale, and has stayed there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9318001

Is there a way to express the existence of this conflict of interest without being accused of being negative?

Your comment looks like a lot like FUD to me. You're implying a lot of bad without even attempting to establish that anything bad has happened.

It seems to me that the way to say negative things without being accused to gratuitous negativity is to have the negative things be substantial and useful rather than just an expression of one's own cynicism.

For example, if a conflict of interest had actually reared its ugly head, that comment would be apropos. But in this case, the situation where HN used this rule to do something bad is entirely hypothetical, and is hardly an inevitable outcome.

So, no, guelo, there isn't. :)

Try to explain why this conflict of interest is not in your interests, as a user of Hacker News.

Sam's post seems like it tried to anticipate this by explicitly stating that "Critical thinking is good; shallow cynicism, on the other hand, adds nothing of value to the community." They're not asking you to turn off all critical thinking about YC companies, YC startups, or the Silicon Valley investment community. They're asking that you think critically - that doesn't mean blanket dismissals, it means pointing out specific elements that are objectionable which they should change.

For example, something like: "Could you clarify whether the following types of posts might be acceptable?

1. We've had a negative experience with a YC startup that we believe the community should know about.

2. A new idea that someone posted has obvious theoretical flaws that have been encountered and documented in the literature.

3. The policy that you just wrote an essay espousing will lead to the following consequences a, b, and c, which will have these negative effects on society."

I have no connection to YC, but I'm guessing the responses to that would be "1.) e-mail the founders and try to work out your dispute with them personally fails. If that doesn't work, e-mail sama@ycombinator.com. 2.) these are fine, but link to the theoretical findings so everyone else can understand and judge them for themselves 3.) also fine."

The point is that then, your comment is specific and actionable, and readers learn something useful from it, rather than simply learning "guelo is a cynic".

Given the fact that people get points for their answers, there is already bias towards positive and encouraging comments in hacker news. Notice how the comments start positive and later slowly add the information just to be "safe". Of course not in all cases. From my experience: if I give shallow positive comment I am more likely to get positive points, but strict negative and often deeper comment is down voted. This rule can further increase this bias.

That sounds like a good thing.

It may sound like it on the surface, but I don't think it is a good thing in the long run.

There's a fine line between making a community and making a herd. Upvoting / downvoting encourages both, the problem being trying to have enough to encourage the first without enough of the second to lose the community you've built.

It's not just a good idea for HN. It's a good practice to apply in one's everyday life, generally.

There is a good reason to be negative a priory in real live. Consider you start a thorough discussion on any problem that you encounter during the day. You wouldn't be doing anything else and die of hunger. In my opinion, people must be negative and quickly reject stuff that does not make sense to them. Forcing them to discuss about stuff that don't make sense to them is waste of time for both sites. For this reasons I would simply ignore negative comments and not ban them.

Dismissing things that don't make sense probably isn't a good idea. Some of the most interesting things I've learned have been from working hard to discuss and understand something that didn't make sense to me at the time.

Also, there are often cases when someone has an idea or thought that isn't necessarily framed with the right wording. That doesn't make the idea invalid and it is often worth exploring to understand what they were trying to express.

These things is a 'waste of time', in my opinion. In fact, it is often the direct opposite: A wonderful use of time.

Great change.

I second the request for examples -- "gratuitous" is subjective, and until better moderation tools exist, it would be nice if the community has some standards around who to issue "gentle reminders" to.

It would also be nice to have the guidelines be in a more prominent spot than the bottom of the page -- it's hard to notice them as is.

This is the worst idea ever. I'm generally a pretty negative person for a reason. Negative feedback is necessary for anything to actually get better.

And who or what decides what is "gratuitous". This is a recipe for despotism and censorship.

I disagree. Feedback is usually necessary for anything to actually get better.

Negative feedback might be necessary for the commenter to feel better.

I couldn't agree more. What gets sold to us as an idea that will reduce "gratuitous" negativity can pretty quickly tun into a tool that censors any valid criticism of YC companies that would have a material negative impact on their portfolio's value.

You can provide negative feedback in a useful constructive way. I don't get the impression that HN wants you to stop doing that.

I agree. This reminiscent of a manager that wants to make a mark by creating arbitrary, vague rules out of the blue.

This a community. Was there a "we think we may have a gratuitous negativity problem" discussion?

Thin end of the wedge, perhaps. I hope not.

(From the article) "Too much gratuitous negativity might be the difference between someone giving up on a crazy idea and building the next Airbnb."

If negative, anonymous feedback here disuades and disenchants them, what hope is there?

Are we going to have a Safe Place section of the site, to protect applicants from all bad things?

Bad things happen. Mean people will say mean things on the Internet. Life is hard.

> If negative, anonymous feedback here disuades and disenchants them, what hope is there?

Absolutely. See Dropbox's Show HN, the slashdot iPod announcement, and every other worthwhile product ever. As a community we're pretty bad at picking successes.

People are also erroneously overrating things all the time. The problem with our predictions isn't a skew to negativity, just the normal inability to predict the future due to lack of knowledge.

There's also a definite survivorship bias (and an equally strong failure bias) to remember only the outliers. Most ideas fall squarely in the middle and we promptly forget about them.

(obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/1497/)

yup. personally i feel that being able to receive unfiltered, honest feedback on the internet is a feature, not a flaw.

> This is the worst idea ever.

I can think of several ideas actually implemented in human history that were much worse.

> And who or what decides what is "gratuitous".

FTFA: "How are we going to enforce this? By asking the community to do so. Gentle reminders by peers are the best way we know to make the culture better."

> This is a recipe for despotism and censorship.

I don't see how that is any more true of the HN guidelines with this addition than it was of the HN guidelines without it. Could you, perhaps, flesh out the basis for this conclusion?

Great to see this. Fortunately those sorts of comments usually get downvoted here. Also this is one reason I stopped following so much of the developer community on Twitter. So much of it is full of snark and piling on others mistakes for a quick retweet.

My comments (depending on my mood) will often include "Snark" while still making a point. I suspect I'm going to get down-voted much more often if the community decides that down-votes are the way to enforce this. I don't mind being down-voted occasionally but I'd rather not be hell-banned - I think I still contribute to the community overall.

I (previously) used the average karma/contribution on my profile page to self-police by trying to maintain an average around at least 3. Any idea why it was removed? Will it be coming back in some form? Any ideas on other ways to make sure I'm staying positive on here?

If worried, you can always email us at hn@ycombinator.com to get a reading on what's going on (not that we always know). But really, don't worry about it. Of course you're a positive contributor. Truly negative contributors, by the way, never worry about this.

We got rid of average because (a) after looking extensively at the data we didn't see any value in it, (b) we had evidence of people gaming the metric, (c) its implementation was complicated, and most importantly (d) we think upvotes are wrong thing to optimize for. Optimize for saying substantive things.

> To support this, Daniel and the HN team are working on another new idea I'm very excited about--code-named "Modnesty"--to turn more moderation power over to the community. We'll be sharing more on that in the coming months.

That sounds really interesting. I'm curious what kind of additional moderation capabilities this potentially includes. In particular, personally I'm less interested in the moderation ability to more heavily bury or downvote awful comments or stories, and more interested in the ability to "rescue" something that's been excessively flagged/downvoted.

Yes, that's what we're working on. It turned out to be tricky for technical reasons, but we're getting there.

Wow, this post has some hard core moralizing in it. The whole concept that a mean comment is going to prevent the next AirBnB. That may be the case, but it's unfalsifiable and straight up passing more judgement. I can do without that, personally. I mean, you seriously won't let Linus Torvalds post on HN?

Not only that, but overly positive, glass always half full comments for the sake of guidelines might prevent the next AirBnB too.

Perhaps for those people seeking feedback who want brutally raw, might-hurt-a-bit honesty, a special flag can be set inviting all manner of such comments. I know I'd elect for that, and would be disappointed with anything less. Spicy internet discussion can flush out the pipes of a concept and invigorate thoughtful discussion quite efficiently. It can also derail, but it's worth the risk IMHO.

being a cynic with startups and new tech is an easy way to appear wise and correct since ~90% fail, so it is no surprise many take it up as a position as you can appear a genius while offering no actual insight, base it on little actual understanding and it doesn't require much thought.

It's such an important point, and I think it applies to new ideas and projects as well as it does to startups. You can maintain a high correctness percentage simply by negating everything, but this is guaranteed to destroy expected value.

One psychological aspect of this is the need to feel that one is right. Smart technical people can become addicted to this, but it's the wrong thing to optimize for if you care about curiosity, which it kills.

I do not agree with this.

I agree with the principle, but in practice, it is too subjective. Reasonable people can - and will - disagree as to what is warranted and what they consider justifiable.

Now, if it was well-defined, that would be something else. But I don't see any way of doing so, humanity being such as it is.

Great move! HN is in dire need of this guideline. Someone could post the most amazing new project that they have worked months/years on, and the comments section would inevitably have comments like "this is rubbish, completely unusable, security flaws here and there" etc etc

Aside from "this is rubbish" the rest of that sounds very constructive.

Anyone with a product to share should want feedback. Doesn't mean that person needs to act on it.

Also, if you are criticized, take a second to think about it before immediately defending yourself.

The worst Show HN threads are where the OP feels the need to respond to every comment on the board to defend his or her project.

Learn to take the criticism.

People saying it is useless are useful, however, because you can see why it is useless to them and either accept it isn't part of your target market or change the product to include them. People just saying great things when they aren't allowed to be negative is kind of meaningless and unhelpful.

> People saying it is useless are useful, however, because you can see why it is useless to them

No, people saying why it is useless (which is grounded, not gratuitous, negativity at worst) are useful for that reason. People merely saying that it is useless are not useful.

> People just saying great things when they aren't allowed to be negative is kind of meaningless and unhelpful.

A community guideline against gratuitous negativity cannot reasonably be expected to result in "people saying great things when they aren't allowed to be negative" because people are still allowed to be negative, and, in any case, people saying positive things with explanations are just as useful as people saying negative things with explanations.

I'm not really sure what the problem with that is. Security flaws are important to know about, as well as personal opinions. We don't want HN to turn into a hugbox, as that gets rid of all the info that is useful.

Positivity is nice, but criticism is what chips away at the block of marble until it becomes a beautiful statue.

I'm glad they finally stepped in to try to deal with this problem.

HN has long ago become something of a joke to the rest of the English-speaking internet at large. When a great many people you know and respect "can't be bothered with that site", you should be concerned.

For those of you thinking this is somehow unnecessary, let me remind you that genius will only take you so far. Good social skills get you the rest of the way. Look at this as an opportunity for self-improvement where you may not recognize that you need some.

Random idea:

How about an extra pair of vote-buttons to classify a comment as "positive/negative" (karma-neutral)?

I often find the karma-system frustratingly one-dimensional.

Experiments in that direction are of course a slippery slope, but what place other than a hacker forum could be a better petri dish?

If we have extra buttons, let's have them be toggles like flag/unflag and name them something like "mean", "inane" and "misleading".

Yes, that's actually the direction I was aiming for, a little bit like the Slashdot system.

I just think it's very hard to choose meaningful adjectives/dimensions (the slashdot set also quickly feels limiting). That's why I'd start with the most basic sentiment(s) first (positive|negative, agree|disagree, ...), see how that goes, and possibly extend from there.

What do adjectives have to do with commenting?

Not with commenting but with classifying the comments.

As maxerickson said we'd have additional votes for adjectives like e.g. "mean", "interesting", "funny" and others, but the hard part would be to choose a meaningful set.

I think almost any set would probably feel arbitrary and limiting quickly, so I'd rather stick with very few, very basic ones and see how that goes.

I think the bigger problem is what to do with the extra information.

In that light, something like "too far off topic" is probably more useful (I think the too far is good there, as a reminder that things probably ought to range a bit).

Some tips:

If you write a response, before sending it go back through and edit it, think about removing unneeded negativity now that you have a fully fleshed post.

If your post starts with "No." or "You're wrong." consider removing those and just letting your argument stand on its own.

Consider using softer and more charitable words like "mistaken" instead of "wrong". Usually that's what is meant in most cases anyway.

Avoid the backdoor route to building a strawman, don't add unspecified details or intensity to a post that isn't there. Doing so makes it easier to get on a high horse, but usually that isn't warranted. Get used to having a genial exchange of views with a slight difference of opinion, it's not necessary for every "argument" to be a fight to the death.

Try to read posts by others more charitably, and take the time to apologize for mistakes you've made or times you've let your emotions get the better of your reason.

Upvote comments you disagree with that are well made and lead to a good discussion.

These are good tips. I will be using them.

Do you have advice how to figure out if someone is responding in bad faith, and what to do in those situations ?

EDIT: > Avoid the backdoor route to building a strawman, don't add unspecified details or intensity to a post that isn't there.

What if you must add details to clarify what the context of the post is ? ex .Water is liquid. I reply But Water is solid when below freezing.

If someone is responding in bad faith, then usually you just want to curtail talking to them. If you think it's still necessary to continue the thread due to the "audience", then concentrate on facts and sources and just make the strongest argument you can then just leave it alone. Avoid trying to get the last word or being goaded into responding just because someone said something that makes you upset.

In regards to clarification, that's easy, ask questions, ask for clarification. Just don't assume.

Using HN guidelines Linus Torvalds is a terrible person and wouldn't be allowed to post here for very long before he was hell banned.

Maybe the issue isn't so much negativity as it is sensitivity.

> Using HN guidelines Linus Torvalds is a terrible person

HN guidelines do not address whether a person is good or bad (or "terrible").

> and wouldn't be allowed to post here for very long before he was hell banned.

You assume that Torvalds, if he choose to participate in HN, would apply the same mode of interaction he applies in different contexts with different expectations.

While, certainly, there are people who are unable to adjust their mode of interaction based on what is appropriate in different contexts, I don't see that it is clear that Torvalds is among them.

> Maybe the issue isn't so much negativity as it is sensitivity.

Or maybe the issue is that what lots of people want out of HN isn't the same kind of environment in which the actions of Torvalds to which you are obliquely referring occur.

>Or maybe the issue is that what lots of people want out of HN isn't the same kind of environment in which the actions of Torvalds to which you are obliquely referring occur.

The actions of Torvalds, though brash, are respected not because of his accomplishments, but because his assertions are usually quite valid. Many of us can learn from not discarding useful counterpoints simply because of how colorfully or insultingly they are delivered.

Doesn't that depend on whether Linus is posting gratuitously negative stuff to HN? I don't think it matters to this guideline whether Linus bawls out kernel lieutenants on kernel mailing lists.

One issue with this regulation is that hacker news is an international community and there are strong cultural differences in what is perceived as being too negative. In the US, people have a very low threshold and there is always a high pressure to be positive and supportive. People from Europe perceive this as phony and they tend to be more direct with their criticism. I lived in both cultures and observed that in the US there is a strong emphasis on presenting criticism in a considerate and toned-down way, whereas in Europe people are better at dealing with open criticism. There are merits to both approaches and I don't think it's a good idea to force the American way of doing things on this community. Hacker news needs to evolve a composite of the two ways to deal with criticism in an organic fashion.

This is an important point and one reason why we have no interest in overdoing this. HN already is a composite of the kind you're talking about. It's not perfect—there is cross-cultural friction—but it is workable.

I think I agree with the spirit of this guideline, but I have serious doubts that it can work. Here's why: I joined HN a year or two ago. I didn't go back and read any posts written before I joined. Anyone joining after today will have no idea that this is the way things are supposed to be.

Further, I suspect (though I hope I'm wrong) that a rule like this could end up causing the same issues that people here complain about with Stack Overflow. Namely, we'll end up with a brigade of people who feel it's their job to keep the "gratuitous negativity" to a minimum. The only problem is that everyone will have a different idea of what constitutes "gratuitous". But I hope to be proven wrong!

> I think I agree with the spirit of this guideline, but I have serious doubts that it can work.

Let's see. HN is experimental, and this is just another experiment. If it works, it will be because community members help shift the culture in a higher-quality direction.

That, by the way, is also how newcomers find out about these things. Rules don't communicate themselves, but culture does.

Putting the rules on the comment page might help, though. Not just a link, either, but the whole set of guidelines, along with a statement to the effect that, by posting, you agree to abide by the guidelines. A constant reminder that this is a community with certain expectations of it's members.

Dang, what's the percentage of active / new users who visit the guidelines page? Can you measure this in the website analytics?

> Rules don't communicate themselves, but culture does.

At this point, you should really just copy the methods that Producthunt used to shape their community culture. Their strategy was perfect. In PH's case, it wasn't some intangible culture persuading people how to act, it was the founders directly telling people that being supportive and friendly is absolutely required, or else you'll be banned from commenting. See their 3 great recent videos on this precise topic:

https://courses.platzi.com/classes/build-grow-online-communi...

I think that would be going too far. There are many ways to comment substantively and civilly. Being supportive and friendly isn't absolutely required.

Interesting choice of metrics. I'll just point out this community culture difference:

- Mods on sites like PH tend to measure quality by the results of how the comments are likely to affect the post's creator. E.g. Could a comment contribute to preventing the next AirBnB from happening. No metrics that can be gamed to get around that.

- HN mods seem to be measuring quality through simple crude metrics like civility and substantiveness. Is HN really that unwilling to consider how the comments emotionally affect the creators? Trying to put this in the nicest way, the HN mods come across as autistic and emotionally detached. It's actually very easy for a regular person to understand whether a comment will be inclined to making someone want to quit working on the creation they've shared, no matter how civil or substantively it's written

> Trying to put this in the nicest way, the HN mods come across as autistic and emotionally detached

The nicest way? :)

Assumptions that work at one scale stop working at the next, which is one reason this stuff is hard. You're making assumptions about "regular persons" and what's "very easy" that aren't true of the HN community as a whole. We couldn't enforce those by decree even if we wanted to.

I can see what you mean about the scaling problems.

Must comments be soothing and agreeable to be appreciated at all? Is it okay to be caustic if you're also making a good point?

For example, I often say intentionally chaotic things in relation to Microsoft stories because we have a history and this reflects my current impression of that company.

That said, I find a lot of their recent changes, open source contributions, and future plans very agreeable and sometimes amazing and I try to point that out.

So, is it ok to dredge up their past transgressions if I can simultaneously make positive observations regarding MSFT's future?

Even though I tinge towards the negative/chaos, I notice that I can 'score' better with people whenever I put effort into the quality of my writing.

No, they merely need to be substantive.

This is a sensible policy only until you have to define what is and isn't substantive.

Since "substantive" tends to evaluate to "it changed my mind or I don't believe it to be completely wrong," it becomes a subjective game very quickly.

Arguing something that many people disagree with outright is inherently going to look negative no matter how 'substantive' it turns out to be.

The post we're commenting on addresses this: this concern is why the guideline is enforced only as a community norm, not with code.

In other words, it's a policy with no teeth, a simple admonishment?

I mean, I don't disagree: I think this changes absolutely nothing. If anything it's a renewal of the old guidelines, not an addition to them.

I suppose I think there's some ambiguity into what is intended, and there's therefore some investigation into HN's relationship with negativity going on.

There's a kneejerk reaction to view this as an attempt to prevent people like me from spouting their usual hostility towards the tech scene, and I demand the right to be booed off stage!

I run with "Would I say this to their face using these exact words if I was introduced to them in a room"

If not, then perhaps I should rephrase it, to convey the same message, but perhaps without it being a personal attack.

Online discussion simply isn't the same as being in a room with someone, or more precisely, it's a type of 'room' all its own.

We're not being introduced to each other by mutual acquaintances who then have to get along with one another for the remainder of an evening. We're not even at a house party in a city we've never been to before meeting people that may become good friends. Nor are we at a press conference asking questions of a PR representative.

Instead we can take up and discard facets of these situations as we see fit.

...I'm not saying it's a bad idea to consider your hypothetical when talking with other people online. It's probably a good idea in almost every discussion.

But this room also allows us to be marvelously direct. The questions that everyone is thinking but don't get asked in a press conference can be addressed.

That's why I back the right to be negative so heavily. Even if it means that we have totally rude, toxic threads that no one likes, I'd rather have that if it means we get to keep our online rooms open. (Partially because we're going to have those toxic threads anyway.)

Everyone's an equal in the comment section, even if that means we're all equally poisoned.

The flaw in your argument is its assumption that the community would remain intact under such poisoning.

When the threads degenerate, smart people leave. When smart people leave, the threads get less substantive. That vicious cycle leads to the death of the community, not the vital online place where people are free to speak their minds which you're positing.

HN started as [1] and remains an experiment in seeing whether an internet forum can avoid that dynamic. It's more fragile than your comment implies.

I do think we can have the benefits you're talking about, such as people bringing up the questions they're really thinking, as long as the bulk of the community will consciously practice the values of the site. Those values are substantiveness and civility, and there's nothing in the good parts of what you're talking about that contradict them. Unleashing the online id, though, is another matter.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

The flaw in yours is that a community without poison isn't worth having (and probably doesn't exist anyway). And nothing makes people happier than seeing poison dissolved amicably, right?

In fact, from a certain point of view poison is a valuable resource, and needs to be harvested. Good criticism is hard to find. Limiting it to that which is polite towards you is a good way to end up in a filter bubble, especially if there is a one-sidedness in how politeness is determined.

This thread divides commenters into roughly two camps. There's the "Yes, sir! Let's all get along!" camp, and there's the "You can't make people get along, why are you trying?" camp. And I suppose it might be a good idea to stoke the enthusiasm of the first camp, so maybe I'm just not the intended audience.

But in that case you're either just stirring the pot, or you're actively driving away those that favor substantive criticism when it's called for. Maybe those people aren't really listening to the specifics of what Altman is saying, but that just means it's being communicated poorly.

Smart people leave for a multitude of reasons. I've been rate-limited, or maybe you've got this topic rate-limited, or whatever, but you responded to me: doesn't that mean you want to hear my point of view? I mean, maybe I'm not smart, maybe I'm just presumptuous and acerbic.

But either way, you've got policies that increase the poison. I'd have been done with this topic by now, but having had another comment written up already I'm not going to discard it. I'm going to wait, and grow irritated that your system is attempting a patronizing herding tactic to 'tame' discourse. A tactic that isn't working, because the poison always leaks through, and this topic is already poisoned, why are you even bothering to stop me from responding to you?

And I think... it's true. You're just another authority, making sure that points of view you agree with are given preferential treatment. You don't want me here. You don't want dissent. I'm not free to speak my mind here, because you don't like the bitterness I want to share earnestly and substantively.

You're poisonous.

Another group of shunners shunning other shunners. And the poison concentrates: if I can never make this comment, I'll still have the poison from having been treated like this, and it will spill over some other way. Maybe in a meaner way.

Or you'll succeed in driving off everyone that stirs up trouble.

I sympathize with you because internet moderation is an unsolved problem because people are an unsolved problem. It sounds like you have some awareness that the current penalties are too much (when you talk about rescuing flagged or downvoted or hellbanned comments).

But there's a difference between moderating the id and amputating it.

This topic doesn't moderate the id because the cheerful collaborative people you're not worried about are the ones theorizing on how to make conversation better.

It does, however, successfully marginalize people that disagree and honor the process of disagreement. (Which is funny, because we're not even talking about practical policy enforcement, we're just socially reinforcing what was already a general guideline. Nothing changes for this site as a result of this discussion, the discussion is the only end result of the discussion.)

---

Here is some fragment of the comment I had written, in response to your comment here (https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=9318451)

---

Sometimes the other isn't in good faith, or it's necessary that that good faith be constructed or established in a critical environment.

I sympathize with you, because there's something utopian you're striving for, and I mean that as mostly a compliment.

But I don't want to live in your utopia, because living in a community where people never take their negative feelings out on one another is equivalent to a community where no one has negative feelings.

There's an old saying that poison is in the dose, not the substance. Many things are therapeutic in one quantity, fatal in another. An innovative community needs some of that nootropic "poison" once in a while. We already have social pressure and technical mechanisms (upvotes and downvotes) to deal with these differences of opinion about whether negativity is warranted. Over-policing such things, by declaring criticism as "gratuitous" even when the justification for it is clear, won't improve diversity of opinion. Au contraire. Comments that are negative but in accordance with established opinion will be deemed non-gratuitious. Comments which challenge the zeitgeist will - in the very moment of their greatest fragility as they're introduced to the community - be stamped out as gratuitous precisely because they're unique.

The answer to "negativity killing the next AirBnB" is that over-policing negativity will give us nothing but AirBnB. That's not a good outcome either.

You needn't worry on either score. There's no question of lurching to an opposite extreme—it wouldn't be doable and is not how we think about HN.

As for over-policing, we don't have the staff, don't want the staff, and the staff we do have don't like police work.

I might believe that if our one previous interaction hadn't been a case of selectively over-applying the "no gratuitous negativity" guideline before it was even announced.

Not to beat a dead horse or keep a totally unproductive thread alive longer than it has to be, but, if this is you:

http://pl.atyp.us/

(from your profile) you seem like an interesting person with a lot of experience and perspective to contribute.

So with that said: why not be specific about the selective over-application you're talking about? I couldn't find it in the comment history.

People probably won't agree with you but it would probably be helpful for them to at least know where you're coming from. It has to be better than just resigning yourself to the idea that the moderators are working in bad faith against you.

For my part, if it helps you to know this: I'm one of several people who have been leaning on the mods for literally years to add something about negativity to the guidelines. They pushed back on suggestions for a long time out of many of the exact same concerns people are voicing on this thread. It's not a sudden decision they've made.

I didn't consider it an issue worth pursuing, but since you asked:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9290629

I dispute both parts of "gratuitous negativity" wrt the sentence in question. First, it might have been snarky or disrespectful, but neither is the same as being negative. "Gratuitous" is even harder to justify, because the sentence was only the conclusion to a substantive point about the nature of Dunning-Kruger - one that at least 34 community members had considered solid enough to give an upvote. That sentence isn't going to kill the next AirBnB. At the same time, there were other comments on the same thread that were more clearly negative and more clearly gratuitous. Even though dang had even quoted one, this was the only one that got a direct reply.

To reiterate: I don't really care. I'll gladly accept my ticket for jaywalking, but not while drunk drivers are careening around on the sidewalk. I don't think there was any agenda or vendetta involved here, either. There was simple perceptual bias. This comment was singled out because of its visibility, not its content, and that's enough. It certainly puts the lie to the "no time or inclination" claim. Active policing without equally active attempts to avoid this kind of unintentional bias is effectively the same as deliberate bias.

Let's concentrate on finding and discouraging the truly toxic comments, before we start picking mild ones "at random" - because when visibility is involved it's not really random at all. It means comments that have attracted some attention will get quashed before those that everybody already realized weren't worthwhile.

A lot of us (I'm at the top of the list) are occasionally hasty to be negative on the hottest new social media startups. As SA says, it's human nature to feel jealousy and sour grapes. "Damn these kids and their stupid chat apps that I could have made in 3 days when I was 16... and now they're raising 10 million dollars???". That's how most of us grinding it out at big companies likely feel when we read post after post of it, but it's not constructive to either ourselves or the community. Instead, I think there are some things to learn about markets, trends and even of how to conquer our own defeating psychosis from these stories.

This is precisely the kind of self-reflection that, in my experience, helps one resist the temptation to negativity that Sam wrote about in his post. It isn't easy and one invariably lapses, but it's profoundly worth doing. Thanks for giving us an admirable example.

I don't think negativity is intrinsicly bad or harmful.

Obviously there's a line where a comment becomes predominantly mean.

The only concern I have is that one day it takes too much cognitive overhead to post an insightful comment that happens to be negative.

This sucks, just trying to pretend everything is wine and roses and everyone is happy, happy, happy all the time.

Couldn't help it.

Well, at the risk of adding "gratuitous negativity" to this comment thread, I'll say this: sounds like another way for people to rationalize downvoting posts they merely dislike or disagree with.

Excited about this. I would love for this to be implemented all over the internet.

It is fairly easy to be negative. In fact, the cynical approach is the easiest point of view you can take. I have been working on this myself, and I encourage everyone to try and go the whole day/week/month practicing the opposite.

I think this has to do with how we are taught. Critical thinking somewhere down the line gave justification to being 'gratuitously negative'. I went my whole life thinking that I was being helpful when in reality I was just hurting people.

It isn't so much the negative comments that bug me as much as the downvoting with no explanation.

I wondered the same the other day. Best explanation I could come up with is that an explanatory comment would expose the downvoter to being downvoted (in retaliation or otherwise).

I read this and immediately thought "I hope I never actually did this myself"

Looking through my comment history, I have a few times previously. We're all fallible, but at the same time this sort of negativity can come through without intending it. I'm really caring and optimistic, so to see some of my comments become unintentionally overly negative is kind of humbling.

Let's all remember how easy this is to do and keep an eye on ourselves. It matters.

good idea. perhaps we should abolish downvoting too- isn't that the very definition of gratuitous negativity?

It would be interesting to run a six month exercise in which HN users could tag HN posts with single keywords that identify the tone of the post.

I have an idea related to this guideline.

Good tools already exist to do automated sentiment analysis. It would be extremely interesting to build forum software for HN that detects when a commenter is going too far with negativity and then gently guides that person to tone it down a bit while the comment is still being composed.

Maybe a few gentle prompts at the right moment is all it really takes.

I'd love to be wrong about this, but believe that the sentiment tools are too crude to rely on. They tend to get the nuances of conversation wrong, and those are the life blood of HN threads.

We do intend to try it, though, when we have the cycles. It might be useful as a supplement, or if nothing else a fun experiment.

This might work if enforcement had any chance whatsoever of being enforced fairly, and not just another club the staff and the already-karma-rich can use to harass people who don't see the world as they do. Is it gratuitously negative for me to point out that, in the entire history of moderation systems on forums like these, that has never happened? Here's what I really expect will happen, based on thirty-plus years' experience online.

* Comments that are insightful and informative overall, and recognized by the community for being so, will still get dinged for one poor choice of phrase.

* Comments that are critical of anything outside the already-obvious zeitgeist, but worded passive-aggressively enough that their actual gratuitous negativity and chilling effect can be explained away, will get a pass.

This will have less of an effect on negativity than on diversity of opinion.

Could anyone develop some arguments for "gratuitous negativity". An attempt would focus on the adjective "gratuitous" which contains a lot of subjective bias and could be interpreted this way or that way depending who rules the domain.

Moreover one can claim "gratuitous positivity" is the bigger danger.

I think this is an effective idea for building community, but it is not rational or scientific if carried to far. An important principal in science is falsification. Actively attacking an idea provides a critically important perspective and those who avoid that perspective are doomed to failure.

I've seen reference to this and other HN guidelines in the past, but the only reason that I know what some of these guidelines are (or even about their existence) is because of occasional mention in discussions. Is there a single source for the guidelines that I should be following?

There is a link in the footer to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Critical thinking is good; shallow cynicism, on the other hand, adds nothing of value to the community.

That's a comparison of apples and oranges. Critical thinking is something you do, i.e. an action. Cynicism is an attribute of a person.

This essentially tells that a cynic, i.e. the person as a whole, should not contribute in the case he/she is shallow. Whatever 'shallow' means in the context of a point of view developed from years of experience.

So even if such a 'shallow cynic' is critically thinking he/she is excluded as per that statement.

I'd rephrase that statement using a word like sarcasm (that is actually an action and not a statement about a person) since the guidelines should not criticize persons but their actions, which is – by the way – the right way to phrase negative feedback.

Correctly interpreting online communication is difficult. What one person considers constructive feedback another person may interpret as negativity.

Reminds me of that Key & Peele skit: https://youtu.be/naleynXS7yo

I like this policy. I think it'll help encourage positivity in a field which can often receive harsh critique. Bullying, especially cyber-bullying has never been an easier, faceless crime that we have to unite to stand up against. Good on you Y-Combinator for leading the efforts.

Mr Zuckerberg and his team must have had similar conversations at Facebook when people keep asking him about whether or not to add a 'dis-like' button. He said publicly that although he did not agree with a thumbs down button, he did see a need for another button which would acknowledge a post.

Say for example, if someone posts about bereaving a lost loved one. Others may not want to hit a 'like' button in that context but would love to hit an alternative 'acknowledge / agree' button.

"Too much gratuitous negativity might be the difference between someone giving up on a crazy idea and building the next Airbnb."

This is melodrama. Ignoring the negativity in comments on an internet message board has got to rank as one of the smallest possible challenges a startup can face.

While on this subject, I would like to see less downvoting for comments you don't agree with but are otherwise ok. Downvoting should be reserved for factually incorrect comments, trolling, meanness and other undesirable properties, not for a difference of opinion.

Request for a special case: if we are the original author or it's a ShowHN, can we allow gratuitous negativity by declaration?

I've had some people talk some mad shit about intercooler.js and yet, after engaging them a bit, I learned some very useful things.

I don't think that violates the spirit of the guidelines, so why not.

Negative comments based on reason are the reason why I keep checking HN comments. Those comments are valuable because trade offs are rarely shown than benefits. However those interesting comments are often downvoted with spinal reflex.

I find the "gratuitous negativity" a bit vague; i think thats poor wording choice, and something more descriptive should be developed. But I agree the principle is is good.

Its ok for people to be dumb, and for ideas or products to be shit. They exist / will keep coming. But if you want to actually contribute to the discussion, ask questions instead of belittling them. Try to steer them in the right direction instead of trying to get them to jump off the tracks entirely. Building stuff is hard, presenting things to your peers is nerve wrecking. Armchairs are comfy to speak from, but they don't move anything forward.

Please remove the ability to download. Downvotes are the first step towards meanness.

<3 I missed your comment!i I felt that way too for https://whatwouldempathydo.reddit.com. It was the first measure I took.

#Meanreal. #Votereal. #Censereal. #Sensereal. #Centreal. . #Traumareal. #Painreal.

Sorry, I meant ability to downvote.

The guideline has some vaguely politically correct overtones, which seems to be putting people off a little, but I think this is unwarranted.

Good comments seem to me to have the same characteristics - insight, good will, lessons from experience, novelty, thoughtfulness. Strongly held, polarising and poorly explained opinions aren't one of those characteristics.

I myself have written comments which start with a negative comment, and then through fleshing it out arrive at a more moderate position at the end... at which point I go back and change the first sentence. Don't just write the first sentence...

Getting downvoted on this board can sometimes be a mark of distinction. And anybody who complains about golang not having generics is a wimpy whiner, IMO. And as has been said before on this board, Hail Satan.

Sorta feel like there needs to be more teeth to this than simply guidelines based.

@SamA what more "severe" approaches did you consider and why did you decide they wouldn't work? This is a difficult challenge.

There's a good chance this will be sufficient. If HN discourse doesn't improve I'm sure sama and others will try something else (perhaps with more teeth, perhaps a software change).

"How are we going to enforce this? By asking the community to do so. Gentle reminders by peers are the best way we know to make the culture better." I like this approach because this, itself, is a gentle reminder to the community. Perhaps the best way is to avoid active censorship and encourage us to reflect upon ourselves. However; I do fear that this will, at least on some threads, lead to a passive aggressive string of comments that's no more helpful than what we are trying to avoid in the first place.

I'm sometimes bothered by the unhelpful cynicism that pops up here and elsewhere, but if I'm bothered more often than I used to be, it's probably more the effect of me getting old than any objective change. Unhelpful cynicism was probably more common in my own comments from five years ago.

Arguing politely (read: effectively) is a skill that takes a long time to learn. These uncultured kids will show up every year, and it would be quite a leap to attribute it to anything but the steady passage of time.

When criticizing a post/article, either commenting about the subject of the article and/or the writer of the article, my rule of thumb is to put myself in their shoes. What if I was the person being written about? Or what if I was the author of the article?

Some comments would (and do) have a negative impact on me. Other more objective comments or advice, though still sometimes hard to take when it is criticism, should be expressed freely.

One of the main ways gratuitous negativity is found here is in downvoting of comments for anything other than trolling. There are many well-meaning comments that are downvoted that should not be. It makes the membership of this site look ugly (those that do the downvoting, anyway). It is bad enough in some cases that I have taken it as a badge of honor; to my mind that means it's not really serving its purpose.

It's a common trend I see, not just here, but in all online forums as they grow. I'm glad to see you guys calling it out.

Great work!

It's amazing just how many arguments reduce to nothing if you discard those that don't apply the principle of charity.

While I understand the reasons behind the article, I don't think it's a real issue on HN. If someone uses gratuitous negativity, other users generally will comment and refute the fallacious claim. As logic and respect are usually kept, users will rarely feel terrible like other communities and forums.

I was thinking that the only possible effect that this policy could have is the complete removal of outsiders (I consider myself one, rarely chiming in on HN), and eventually even insiders will simply migrate elsewhere for meaningful discussion that is not happening on this website.

Why would you think that? We're very concerned with not excluding outsiders. One of the great strengths of the internet is the potential for anyone to make a substantive contribution. Indeed, making substantive contributions should be the way to become an insider (or the healthy equivalent of that concept) on Hacker News.

There are some fair criticisms to be made of HN being a little insular and exclusive. (The leader board, for example—not that we emphasize it or even like it—moves in geological time.) We plan eventually to work on that to encourage more up-and-comers. But how a guideline against gratuitous negativity could discourage any outsiders except trolls is beyond me. It's dismaying that anyone would think so, so please let us know your concerns.

How about doubleplusunpositivity?

In all seriousness, the line between a valuable piece of criticism and gratuitous negativity seems like a fine line, and one of the things I like about HN is that there is usually intelligent criticism in the comments. This seems like it goes against that...

This is great, my only (unconstructive) complain is why you didn't start with this before :)

I hope this doesn't affect the unique pragmatism you find around here. I've seen a lot of ego-stroking back-patting around here recently which don't add substance to conversations, should we have a guideline around gratuitous positivity too?

Gratuitous negativity is a given when it is possible for users to downvote others anonymously for no good reason. My recent posts are a testament to that; thus, a call to avoiding it would necessitate the abolition of downvoting, which will never happen.

The question alot of HNers ask themselves before commenting.."What can I say that makes me sound clever and better than the original poster?". The easy, lazy approach is just to find something to criticize. Alot of insecure people on HN.

Also, one should never take anything too personal. Even if the critique is somewhat mean, try to extract what the critique is about and move along.

You will learn to grow a thick skin, but also, to absorb any useful feedback from whatever source it might come from.

related matter:

1. Negativity or skepticism against announcements related hacking or engineering projects is not beneficial unless it's very detailed or insightful. If you don't like it, move on. Don't give your two cents if it's critique.

2. Negativity or skepticism against announcements related to science should be default (unless they come from top notch publications like Nature or Science). The quality of science news and press releases related to science is abysmal. People consume science hype almost like religious people listen sermons about heaven and don't even realize it. Popularized science posted in HN is 99% rubbish.

“The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.”

– Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, 1930

Unfortunately Sam did not give any examples, so it's hard to understand what exactly he means by "Gratuitous Negativity".

In particular, it's not clear where constructive criticism ends and gratuitous negativity starts.

This is great. I hope the community rally around this and make it happen.

I find the broadness of this guideline really worrisome and likely to exacerbate bad traits HN has developed. It's going to be extremely easy, I invite you to watch for this, to broadly apply it to whatever is against the prevailing groupthink, and selectively exclude the prevailing groupthink. For example, "shallow cynicism" about favorites like Wikileaks will be mercilessly punished, as already happens by downvote, but by contrast "shallow cynicism" about enemies like the US Government is de rigueur here, so pointing out that it is shallow cynicism will be mercilessly punished - now with additional reinforcement from staff due to the "negativity" guideline.

In other words, don't be a big meanie. If you don't see the value in someone else's idea for an invention, ask questions. Maybe you're missing something.

"Modnesty --to turn more moderation power over to the community."

Q. Does everyone get equal access to moderation? If so, will equal access cause a skew in moderation?

As equal as the current access is to flagging, unless we see evidence that that won't work.

thx Dan

I wholeheartedly agree with the spirit of this rule, but I think the better policy is to ban low-effort comments. Either way, glad to see the HN team doing something.

I agree that we should try to reduce "this is a stupid idea" comments, but does that include "this doesn't belong on HN" comments?

Just flag such stuff.

Personally I think it should. HN is not just for technical stuff. If people don't think a submission matters, they won't vote it up.

Parallel comment is also correct - just flag it

These were already against the guidelines:

> Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Even when it's for technical stuff, it's getting condescending pretty quickly. You'll feel bad for being wrong.

And then you should get over it and learn something to correct it.

maybe the blog post about "avoiding gratuitous negativity" is kinda about avoiding the hurting of people's feelings.

HN moderation is total crap, too much control will kill the openness of this platform.

It would be interesting if we all agreed to vote up gratuitously negative and dismissive comments in a Geroge-Costanza-The-Opposite way in response to this (and only this!) post, just to illuminate how much of that goes around.

Can we extend this to the rest of Silicon Valley?

+1. Yes, please.

This is a good step, but I think just the increase in overly political postings vs. tech oriented content has been a major contributor to the negativity.

For sure. I am guilty of it too. It's rather counterproductive (myself included) to get sucked into various "America starts wars" or global warming discussions. Healthy political debate is great but unless it's extremely relevant to tech/startups, this isn't the place. Plenty of space on Reddit for heated religion or politics debates.

I am not so egotistical as to think this policy change was because of me, but I certainly, at times contributed to the fray, especially in political oriented threads. In terms of Show HN, I really think that constructive criticism is helpful, but also encouragement and praise is equally important. We should be rooting for our HN community, not trying to snipe or tear people down. The rest of the world is already really good at that!

I welcome the reminder to seek the best from each other and build each other up as a good mentor would do. No smoke-up-ass platitudes, but certainly we should think of ourselves as part of a huge team out to change the world and do something amazing.

For better or worse, many "tech oriented" topics these days are politics.

Many people in the engineering and related fields often wish to ignore the political discussions and stay focused on the technology. This is an understandable desire. Technology is is often complicated leading to a general hatred of having to context switch into other topics. Experience teaches that it is a usually easier to achieve reliable results with technology you can logically prove or verify that with emotional, capricious, untrustworthy humans.

Unfortunately, technology brought us products such as "smart TV" that bring up serious questions about surveillance and evidence, cheap network clients that allow ubiquitous access to incredible amounts of knowledge that is certain to affect education and testing/grading, and self-driving cars that will require a serious refactoring of many aspects of society.

More importantly, I think it is important to remember that escaping the political side of anything simply cedes any disagreement to those that are addressing politics. I think JMS said it best in the closing lines of Babylon 5: "we had to create the future, or others will do it for us". Technology experts need to address these things, or important decisions will be left to those that are not qualified.

Now, that said, neither technology nor political discussions excuse rudeness, personal attacks, or generally disruptive behavior.

It is part of life lesson to distinguish bull shits from constructive criticism.

If you haven't learned it elsewhere, HN is good place to start.

Sam Altman's response to all the criticism received on his article "Bubble talk."

No. No no no no no no no.

Good luck with that

HN could use a better sense of irony

what a stupid idea

Rah Rah Rah! If your startup is not winning, just pivot, and be positive enough, and you will inevitably win. Selection bias doesn't exist and was made up by negative Nancys.

Seriously though, stick a fork in HN. It's over. Enjoy the echo chamber that this place will inevitably become.

There are echo chamber aspects of HN... Especially Sam's AMA, which I was hoping would be a discussion of Sam's life, philosophies, interesting anecdotes, etc. like it is over on Reddit, but instead was predominantly questions about how to get into YC :(.

Even so I'll take the good with the bad, you still get great insights on technology. It just morphs for the worse when YC companies post, or the topic turn to getting into YC.

If you've been following HN for 4+ years then you will have noticed that, in some ways, HN is already an echo chamber.

The same regular startupy stories with different titles crop up as each new batch of folks discover HN. I'm talking about things like...

- How I increased my conversion funnel by x%

- What I learnt from my 3 failed startups

- [Entreporn Startup] Raises 50m

- How I earned $500k as an indie games developer

- Etc.

"Negativity isn't the problem--gratuitous negativity is. By that we mean negativity that adds nothing of substance to a comment".

You obviously read this or you wouldn't comment. So can you explain how there's anything remiss about this statement?

'Nothing of substance' = hot air useful only for pushing up an empty skimpy container.

This measure is bullshit.

I scrolled to the bottom of the comments because I knew some people would have made jokes and been downvoted for it. Just thought I'd let you know that _I_ laughed, so thanks.

"Critical thinking is good; shallow cynicism, on the other hand, adds nothing of value to the community."

I will assure you that my very deep cynicism was reached through long and arduous resistance to such, but critical thinking, logic, rationality, and truth rank higher than happiness in my book. I will continue to be as negative as I see fit, without being constantly "gratuitously negative".

Hah! This is excellent and exactly what I see happening out in the real world. People don't like the unpleasantness and turmoil of disagreeable ideas and people with those ideas, and so the solution is not to burst the comfortable down-pillow bubble of their existence, but to pad it further by "eliminating" "negativity". Even better considering who gets to decide what constitutes "negativity". Fantastic job, guys. Bravo.

Edit: There are some salient points here about downvoting and how it's affected the community, and I am extremely interested in how "to turn more moderation power over to the community" is going to compound the problem of incentivizing positive-only feedback, id est if and how this "community moderation" mechanism will couple with downvoting to make disagreeing even more hazardous.

"New work and new ideas are fragile. Too much gratuitous negativity might be the difference between someone giving up on a crazy idea and building the next Airbnb. Obviously, we want Hacker News to help startups and people doing new work, not hurt them. Building stuff is hard, and you'll always need a thick skin. But we see no need for Hacker News to make the problem worse."

I see it different way. I think many times, people with terrible startup ideas get led along too far because they haven't been told enough it's not a very good idea. The result can be very harmful: life savings lost, dropping out of college, investors money lost (which could be friends and family).

"The human trait of being unhappy with other people's success is something we’ve all felt and should all try to avoid"

I don't think the negative comments is an example of this. Most of the negative comments I have seen are before a person is successful, not after.

Even so, they are just words. If overly negative comments discourage you from starting a company, maybe you shouldn't be starting a company. You just aren't ready. Negative comments, unless constructive, are meaningless. I just wish more people stopped taking these comments so personally and seriously.

Is this new policy also going to apply to the negative comments I see every day toward opposing political and ideological views?

Many communities have started this policy online, but I have found it's a tool used to silence critics and opposing viewpoints. I just hope this doesn't also happen to the HN community.

This appears to be prompted (EDIT: related to) by my discussion in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317028 .

As I mentioned there, it may be helpful to explicitly differatiate negativity vs. gratuitous negativity in that case. (Most examples of gratuitous negativity I've seen are low effort "this site sucks" comments, which are downvoted for reasons unrelated to negativity, and ad hominem attacks are already covered in the guidelines.)

This wasn't prompted by any recent discussion. It has been a long, long time coming.

so says the censor, so it must be true.

I was struggling to define exactly what is meant by "gratuitous negativity", so thank you for giving what I think is a perfect example. It'd be great if you could answer the following questions about your comment to I think really get to the heart of the matter:

What were you trying to accomplish with your comment?

In what way does your comment move the conversation forward?

What are possible useful responses to your comment?

Interesting that you perceive this as "gratuitous negativity" as that was not my intention. answers to your questions:

1) pointing out that you shouldn't always believe those in positions of power, especially when they are attempting to control the narrative. you may not know this, but dang works for HN and his job is literally to censor comments and articles to ensure they follow the guidelines.

2) by reminding everyone who reads it that they should think critically, not only about the words being said, but also the context in which they are said and who is saying the words.

3) there probably aren't many as it isnt meant to be responded to, so much as to be a reminder to consider who is speaking, and to take all things with a grain of salt. although your response certainly engendered me to reply. but just because it is difficult to respond doesn't mean it isn't a useful contribution.

I have two choices in how to take this most recent reply. I can be the cynic and "think critically" and think you're just trying to come up with justifications for your snide remark after the fact. OR I can be charitable and believe that you're being honest, and really were trying to not be negative/overly cynical and instead acting as a reminder.

What you'll notice is that in your original comment you were not charitable to dang. He made a very clear statement that this change was not a reply to a specific comment. And your reply to that is effectively "you're not trustworthy". You are reinforcing this last point in your most recent reply by reiterating that dang's "job is to censor comments ...". Inferring that someone is untrustworthy is the opposite of being charitable, and falls squarely into "negative" territory.

You may feel that "calling someone out" and thus reminding people to "think critically" justifies the negativity of calling someone untrustworthy, but it doesn't. If you can't demonstrate how dang has shown himself to be untrustworthy, then all you're doing is slinging mud. If you know of an incident where he's been untrustworthy, then the constructive thing would be to say "Unfortunately I don't really believe you dang because you've proven yourself to be untrustworthy [here, here and here]."

And if your base reason for adding the comment is to remind people to "think critically" how patronizing is that to everyone that reads that? Why are you making the assumption that we're not thinking critically? Why do you feel it's your role to make sure that us readers are thinking critically?

Do you see the inherent arrogance in your comment, and thus how that adds to its negativity?

I think a corollary to the "don't be gratuitously negative" guideline, is "don't write as if you know better than everybody else"

I didn't realize it before, but this new guideline is probably targeting people exactly like myself. likely why I only have 40 some karma after however many years I've been on here.

so I guess I'll go back to lurking, since I'm not a member of the portion of the population that knows how to comment properly. does this make me bitter? yeah. but I'm human and I'm allowed to have emotions, no matter how irrational. is it for the "greater good" of the HN community? apparently everyone seems to think so.

y'all can go fuck yourselves :)

You don't have to go back to lurking if you don't want to. What we're asking for can very much be learned. Like a lot of people here, I started out as a caustic commenter. I thought that was a good thing to do, for a bunch of reasons, and it took me a long time to realize that it was a net negative.

There's a lot of learning behind these guidelines and some of us learned it the hard way. You don't have to. Your fellow community members will give you amazingly thoughtful and practical feedback if you show any sign of wanting sincerely to improve.

I don't like this. This is akin to censorship.

But now Bitcoin haters will have nothing to say!

One of the most passive-aggressive habits is avoiding negativity experiences and emotional developments to feel positively correct.

Maturity realizing empathy seconds, that line numbers need to grow exponentially for any form of -logy, requires a deeper stance for tense problem solving pain points.

I agree with the avoiding negativity, but can you elaborate on an example of avoiding "emotional developments to feel positively correct"

Sometimes it hurts to make sense and that is okay.

An example being voted from hell to heaven and back and forth again and again is making your question triggering, meaning being nice is just a command and control like with linux top. I rarely resolve my (social(emotional)) system issues by just id removing and killing task.

(Intergenerational traumas as much and as well as intergenerative gramma(r) traumma [sic].

Aethic-apathic-empathic determination to make an example of singular social commentary is disturbing (but healthy too, if you can actually solve the problem long-term enough to granulate -logy.))

What the heck is a fluidic writer doing in this haunt of logic? Wonderful to stumble across your ologies; keep churning, spurning, turning the logos as you see fit, my friend.

logologicalities* u mean? =))

=∫∫ Hurting here :/ Neighborhood webwatchers still pitchforking to make odd ends meet, even though we can also log and filter listening memercy with that tool memery, hunting predates and predominates gathering emotional-intelligence memresistors.

I hope it helps to remember that this is a non-topic: it's not going to change anything, and so this thread is almost a ritual, about making appearances, saying our piece, and moving on. Gotta love community-as-immanent-voice maintenance!

The legal-rational-emotional ritual is a product of confession made rote war.

#Logy/moderation logy means we realistically have time and space (<3) )) ) for ontologically scoping deeper classes and customs freeing your from repeating isolation.

Self-determination made a ritual of goal-scoring and approval-seeking is really remixing and remaking research, experiences, expression, and development, dangerous because undeterminable if means proof war minus modus log.

I just want community-as-permanent-voice vs. superadmin gatekeeping ve. record-keeping. Sadly combinators for emotional structure are negated at admission for being pathos ve. pleasure, said by men who feel it is best to hotwire perfection immediately as racial capital biteracy static object-relational role model mapping works wonders to make cryscistable (crisis crypto?) structures.

Downvoting negativity is the definition of gratuitous: "given or done free of charge." We logact as-if removing parts of speech of sense of logic is going to change history, without commiting a full transactional analysis.

Whatever. [waiting]

Push harder, folks, I'd like to see this one at the very bottom :)

I∫ will race you. =∫∫ ∫og will race log.

Maybe empathy karma will come around. Empathy comes and goes, money comes and goes, karma comes and goes.

Sadly it hurts when it is accellerated by force of will to determine a ruler and winner to feel good versus bad about.

Fog of war is very real for hacked news logy, where edit change commit revision history is basic needs remorse remotely administrated by the "unsayable trauma of hidden language" rulers.

How true :/

til True. :∫

One day we can log til.

Maybe.

This is a horrible idea. The Panglossianism that will result from this is indicative of the bubble hype which will destroy Silicon Valley, Y-Combinator and Hacker News. In fact, this is the worst idea I ever heard in my life.

So continues the descent of HN...

The guidelines aren't asking you to behave like Pangloss and think everything is perfect. It asks if you do have criticism then address it respectfully and constructively.

According to what moral framework are you precisely defining "respectfully" and "constructively"?

There are plenty of examples in the world where bringing up logical, concise, and polite criticism invokes the wrath of a cabal of power-holders and social media demagogues, especially in a world that promotes the postmodern idea of "interpretation, not intent, is reality"

If it helps you can take respectfully to mean "the recipient will not feel angry or attacked due to the message tone" and constructively to mean "the recipient will finish reading the message feeling positive with ways to improve their work or actions".

And who gets to decide who's being respectful and constructive? Hence Pangloss.

Good example, thanks.

Indeed, it's such a good example that I'm pretty sure it's a deliberate satire, and I'm very sorry that people are voting it down.

This post was unpleasant to read and distracted me from actual work

Why? Your opinion is worth nothing of itself; the reasons for your opinion are a different matter. But here you give none so why comment?

It is with great joy and positive vibrations that I receive this real world implementation of a few worthy ideas from the amazing Psycho-Pass[1] anime series. Cynicism is not conducive to peaceful productivity and it should be gracefully eliminated. Preferably by silencing gratuitously negative voices, for the common good of the cheerfully desperate community of Silicon Valley and by extension - the world.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho-Pass

Psycho-Pass-Words!i

(I missed your social-emotional commentary because, well, hacker news lacks and blocks access and permission to basic data open filters needs sadly.)

Wow. That's pretty subtle.

Quite frankly, I don't think this place has the capability to discern constructive "positive" negativity from truly pointless garbage.

Meanwhile the cloaked negativity where you're thinking cutting criticism but maintain a polite facade runs rampant. That's the toxicity I worry about.

When negativity becomes forbidden, it is only those with power whose negativity gets heard. They (read: you, Sam) only have to sit through negativity that's phrased appropriate to their 'position.'

This is a non-rule anyway. Suggestions aren't going to make the next gender hellhole thread any less toxic.

> Gentle reminders by peers are the best way we know to make the culture better.

Consider this a gentle reminder that you're trying to control the tone of conversations that can't be both polite and honest; it won't work, but that doesn't make you less of a meddling, controlling asshole for trying.

"The human trait of being unhappy with other people's success is something we’ve all felt and should all try to avoid."

The problem is one man's success is another man's failure? Success is a very subjective term. I agree with the post, but not with what I feel is the author's view of success.

In my world, it's not about how much money you have; it's how you got that money, or what you do with it once you accumulated vast amounts.

To any wealthy person. Wealth has many different heads. You can have good genes--great wealth. You can have a kind heart--better wealth. You can have a great intelect--great wealth. You can have Morals--maybe the best success? And yes, you can have financial wealth, but that financial wealth will always be scrutinized because so many times it was made in unscrupulous ways.

Personally, I am not sure airbnb is a sucess, or even legal in most counties in the U.S.? I will fight for it if I ever see it helping out with Homelessness though?

Let me get my Uber out. Their latest commercial, "I don't need a special car to drive for Uber?" Yes--you need a special car to drive for Uber. It must be 2008 or newer. It must be four door. If you drive in NY, it must be on that list.(A list I can't figure out. It doesn't have anything to do with safety, but about aesthetics?)

I know Paul Graham is going after the multiple negative comments that occur too frequently when someone introduces their new app. This site has become more than just a Programmer's site though. Some discussions are going to get heated.

Trauma-erasure. It is empathy-violating when classified moderators without logs claim emotional authorities to tone police by calling their efforts psychological.

Triggering. Why do psychotechnological toolers resist persistent "shrinks for startups?"[1] versus recreating private wars by demanding forward-looking(-locking) statements and then having our data disappear at trauma random.

[1] http://twitter.com/mikellsolution/status/571590631304388608

The musical version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwp-IvX8VM8

pg's essay on "How to disagree" (http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html) also serves as a useful guideline.

grep 'u r a fag' | rm;

This just totally completely sucks!!

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