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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

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. :)

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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.

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.

> 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.

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