Comment by abalone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abalone | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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