This is pretty subjective, but I honestly enjoy a certain amount of negative comments.
When I click a link on hacker news and end up on a project page, it’s generally all positive. You go to some new kickstarter and you don’t see “This product I want to build is alright.” You see “This new thing I’ve got is AMAZING!”. Every startup landing page tells you, at length, why it’s the best thing since sliced bread. Most github project list off all the things they’re good for.
When I click on an HN project link, I generally get a page telling me how awesome that project is.
So when I go back to the comments afterwards, I want a counterpoint. I’d like a list of things wrong with the glowing self-review I just read. I handful of “Gee, that’s nifty!” comments might be nice, but they don’t really help me evaluate the thing I just read about, and they’re not terribly useful for fostering interesting discussion.
This isn’t as critical for some software products where I can reasonably evaluate their merit on my own, but there are a lot of areas where I’m not an expert. If some post comes along with a tool that it claims will revolutionize farming, I’d love to have someone with a strong agriculture background come by and explain why it’s not nearly as good as advertised.
Of course, there’s a long ways between “this is shit!” and “This is neat, but here are some flaws.” I’m all for criticism being constructive, rather than destructive, but let’s not throw out useful negativity. When people put up sites telling me how awesome something is, it’s quite valuable to have reasonably well informed people arguing the other side.
Likewise, one reason that there are so many negative comments on (for example) HN is that the article probably already said most of the positive things. There's no need to simply repeat what the article already says, unless it's to explain things that might be unclear.
Again, this isn't an endorsement for pointless or mean-spirited criticism.
Sure, and negative comments that also expand on the original idea are just as good (or perhaps even better). That is, "I disagree, and here is more information necessary to inform that disagreement". I personally think you see a lot of those on this site, and that they shouldn't be lumped in with the general disdain people have for negativity.
I agree that adding to an idea or expanding on one is harder. The first thing I think of is a college class, when none of the students will explain an answer or add to discussion.
its always seemed to me that there needs to be more dialog and questioning vs "hers's by the op was wrong".
hacker news also needs more humor. maybe the best argument I've heard is that there are other places to get humor on the net and people come to HN to get the non-humor part. For me though ... I like joking with like minded folks ..and I don't often find them on the funny sites.
I honestly don't think that is the point of the article. It goes deeper than that. I think most people who are worth their salt like honest critique.
The problem in my mind is that a whole generation of primarily academics have learned critical thinking but not how to create but they treat critical thinking as if it's creating.
This goes way beyond comments on hacker news, this goes all the way into corporate culture where there is often a race to be the one who point out the flaw in some proposal which is counterproductive to then creating.
If you have the time spend some time reading Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmul from Pixar. He goes to great length to show the difference between having an environment where proposing is regarded higher than shooting down what's proposed.
What I would like to add is that the author seems to neglect, that it's actually the negative comments through which you are able to learn new things about a specific topic - for the exact reasons that you mention.
How can one start to criticise such an article without proving it right? :)
>So next time you read something, try this: Instead of looking for the parts you can prove are false, try to find pieces you can learn from.
Who says the two are mutually exclusive? If you seek the truth of something, then as a reader you should do both, and as the writer you should welcome constructive criticism. If I were to write something that had inconsistencies, false assumptions, or driven by an agenda other than seeking the truth, no one would be doing me any favours by not pointing it out.
I suggest that the problem is not criticism, but what drives it, and that there are two different motives for criticism (although both can exist simultaneously in an individual): One is the pure search for truth. What drives this is a strong sense of wonder and curiosity at everything. The other is ego, whose trademark is that it usually ruins everything it touches and turns everything into a fight/competition instead of learning and cooperation.
The blend of ego vs. integrity behind criticism is usually evident in the ratios of information vs. demagoguery that are used.
I'd therefore change the suggestion to "next time you read something, check whether it's you ego or your curiosity speaking before you reply, and if it's more of the former, double check that you really have something to contribute before hitting 'send'".
And of course, I welcome any criticism regarding the above opinion :)
I agree :-) But I suspect the (correct) distinction you made between the two different motivations for criticism are irrelevant to Hacker School because criticism of any kind is seen as an impediment because some groups find criticism intimidating, and a primary goal of Hacker School is inclusivity and diversity. That is why the conclusion of the essay was to stop being so critical rather than be more judicious about what you criticize. I totally agree with them that there is too much worthless criticism, but what works for them can't be a universal prescription. But maybe I'm reading to much into it.
The negativity of the internet bothers me as well. Somewhat amusingly, I find it is often difficult to express agreement with someone without confusing them, there seems to be an assumption that if you are replying to someone you are probably disagreeing with them.
Despite feeling this way, any time I go back and read my own recent comment history, I am shocked to find that most of my comments are still corrections/disagreements.
I am in the habit of persistently deleting comments. Sometimes my disagreements are just one half of a conversation I should be having in my head, alone.
"Essay writing" is a nice habit to help with this. Sometimes, my brain is too small to store the extent of a conversation, so I pull up a text editor, and write comments there, respond to them, and so on.
The Internet is a medium full of ads and self-promotion. A sizable number of articles on blogs, including this one, are of the form "why X is great", by someone selling X. We have plenty of boosterism on line already. Some negativity is useful.
This is a big problem on Wikipedia. In the old days, five years ago, most of the self-promotion on Wikipedia was by bands and DJs. Now it's companies and rich people. There are at least three rich convicted felons, famous for their crimes, with their own paid Wikipedia editors trying to launder their history.
It helps if the negativity is not anonymous. That's why I edit under my own real name.
Real names (as opposed to anonymity and pseudonymity) are double-edged sword, too. In a less civilized countries you can get physically hurt if someone didn't agree with your writings, no matter whenever they're valid and constructive or not. Maybe on civilized ones too, since a joke about punching on s face over TCP/IP didn't happened out of nowhere.
Critical thinking is overrated, constructive thinking is underrated.
Too many turn into critics rather than creators because saying to the world "this is what I stand for, this is what I created" is so much harder than to simply tear someone elses down.
The US is actually much better than Europe but unfortunately academic disciplines and craftmanship are mostly separated in the education system when they should never have been separated to begin with.
Its a shame really cause creation is what matters. And yes I understand the irony of my comment :)
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt
I'd much rather read from film critics about which films are good to see, rather than bloody myself and waste my time seeing five terrible films to find the one good one.
Folks have too narrow a view of what critics do. Critics critique. That can be a hugely beneficial thing. Ever had anyone proofread something for you? That's criticism. Ever had a mentor or an advisor? That involves criticism. And contrary to Roosevelt's comment, criticism can be a very worthy thing.
'Criticism' is not synonymous with 'disparagement'.
Film critics almost never do what online pseudonymous posters do; invariably, in every thread on HN, the top comment shits on the article. Film critics love film- they try to get others to go watch the films they love (or at least read their articles). The HN top comment just functions to show how smart the poster is.
I disagree. Frequently the top comment on HN is continuing the conversation. Often that involves some disagreement, but that's not the same as shitting on the article.
Looking at the first ten articles on the front page right now:
Streem: "I am glad that someone is working on a new stream processing language, it is a very interesting paradigm. "
Margaret Hamilton: "What a truly inspiring human being. I can only dream of aspiring to her levels of contribution."
Sony Hack: "This is the angle on the Sony hack that I find most interesting/troubling/etc. "
DeepDive: "It does probabilistic inference![1]"
Youth metabolism: "I don't really understand the comments here, and especially on the article itself, deriding this research because "people should just get off their butts and exercise" or similar."
Other Money Problem: "One of his essays from a couple of months ago [shows philosophical opposition from essays from 10 years ago]"
Irregular Verbs: "As Steven Pinker points out in this very interesting article... [discussion of verbs]"
LLVM developers meeting: "For those who are curious, Part 1 of Chandler Carruth's Pass Manager talk is avaliable here:"
Overhaul law enforcement: "I'm getting to the point where I can't stand local law enforcement."
Prismatic Android app: "As someone who is rapidly becoming an old-timer, I have to say I miss the old days of Make."
One of the comments disagrees with the article (the last one). One of the comments is questioning the quality of other comments. All of the comments are contributing to the conversation, and none of them can be characterised to be shitting on the article.
The trends continue on with the following articles, but I couldn't be bothered setting up the quoting - this is left as an exercise for the reader.
The irony I saw is that I was responding to a point made by kansface, rebutting a misconception that really isn't true. In doing so, I provided evidence to that, pulling in quotes and citing my methods. I created content. Yes, it's not a prize essay, but it took some minor effort, and more importantly it added information to the conversation. It also wasn't derogatory - I didn't imply kansface was a fool, I only discussed the misconception itself.
Then, despite your earlier protestations of people tearing down instead of creating, you just dismissed what I did out of hand with a mere "we're not talking about that". You added nothing to the conversation with that comment, and tried to stifle a conversation branch in process.
While the greater conversation is about more than HN, a specific point on HN was made, and the same specific point was rebutted. Cutting off that conversation is doing exactly what you were complaining about originally.
"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so..." - Anton Ego
Creation is overrated: Sturgeon's law applies to almost everything (and perhaps undercounts). The most important part of creation is criticism: until you learn how to edit and kill your babies, you won't write anything more than a sentence worth shit. Similar applies to programming. Of course, learning these skills requires writing and programming a lot (for most people: there may be some prodigies).
The most important point of creation is to makie decisions.
That is what you train for. To be able to do as a creator without too many barriers between your intuition and your ability to transform that into something.
A jazz musician who apply critical thinking to her improvisation is not playing.
A writer who think is not writing.
She might not like what she ended up deciding but there is nothing to throw away, no babys to kill if nothing have been created.
I think you're confusing the term "critical thinking" with criticism or negativity- it just means trying to be as objective as possible when reasoning about something. Critical thinking is more about rooting out your own biases than picking apart things said by other people (I would consider that to be just having an argumentative nature).
Someone who has a hair trigger for jumping on other people when they say things that they disagree with is actually applying the opposite of critical thinking- they're not only not questioning their own beliefs, but they're trying to impose them on someone else.
No I am well aware of what critical thinking is and I still stand by that I find it overrated. That does not mean it's not important it is but it's getting way more credit than it deserves.
As I said another place this extends into corporate world where it's actually seen as providing value if you are able to point out problems with what others are suggesting.
Critical thinking has it's place but it's unfortunately often mistaken for creation and there comes a point where it's useless.
There is value in pointing out problems - if you aren't assessing the given pros/cons of a proposal, you're throwing knives blindfolded on a circus wheel...and I don't want to be the one pinned to the wheel with someone doing that. There are too many examples of where this type of thinking sinks everything it pollutes, including startups.
Critical thinking is not given enough value in our society - a lot of people are not successful because they lack it. Spend a prolonged amount of time around many less fortunate people, and you will see this in abundance. Critical thinking is not the only important thing, but it is the fundamental baseline that is most lacking. There are more than enough creators - there are not enough people laying down foundation for creators to proliferate in.
The ability to analyze and assess, and craft a beautiful solution based on the detailed analysis, cannot be possible without the first step of top level understanding. People forget this, and want to jump to the crafting part. The lack of understanding of fundamentals will prevent such people from succeeding, unless it is in spite of themselves. One cannot hope to come up with a beautiful proof of one of the Millennial Prize problems without an understanding of the basics of mathematics. One cannot hope to craft a beautiful composition of music or improvisation without having an intuitive understanding of how certain sounds/patterns move people. One cannot create a fine work of art without a similar understanding of how colors, combinations of colors, and texture affect the total perception.
There cannot be enough stress on the importance of the foundation that is critical thinking. Each of those examples I cited above are examples of critical thinking in action, each in different forms. Critical thinking is not just the formal realm of abstract thought - it is about how we as humans think on a basic level, and how we derive at our conclusions. Certain applications of it involve tapping into previous experiences and quickly determining what should be the next path to take. Others involve carefully reasoned thought.
Yes there is value in pointing out problem. I pointed out a problem with critical thinking being applied too much in too many situations at the cost of actually creating something.
Thats why I called it overrated and not useless.
You are wrong about critical thinking being a requirement for creation it's not and has never been. It can be used, sometimes with success but many times it's being mis-used to represent constructive thinking when it's really just playing devils advocate.
"Yes there is value in pointing out problem. I pointed out a problem with critical thinking being applied too much in too many situations at the cost of actually creating something."
That critical thinking - critical thinking would take that into account. What you are complaining about is overthinking, not critical thinking - abusing the term is dishonest.
"You are wrong about critical thinking being a requirement for creation it's not and has never been. It can be used, sometimes with success but many times it's being mis-used to represent constructive thinking when it's really just playing devils advocate."
No I am not complaining about overthinking I am complaining about how people who learn critical thinking confuse it with constructive thinking, just like you do now.
My initial reaction to this post was similar to many of the other commenters here. There's a real danger in making "negative" comments taboo.
But I don't think Nick's saying "don't make critical comments" here. This sentence encapsulates the idea quite well:
But I fear emphasis has shifted from critically
reflecting on and examining our own beliefs to simply
criticizing and pointing out errors in other people’s work.
If someone proposes an idea and you think it's terrible, it's worth taking a few minutes to think about whether you're wrong or misunderstanding or missing some part of the bigger picture. It's not about accepting ideas un-critically, but instead about examining your own ideas and beliefs just as critically as you're examining others.
I suspect it's just always been the case that many people are bad at this. It's just that the internet has democratized and scaled up the process of getting poorly thought out negative opinions about your work.
I like three general types of comments: 1. Personal stories that expand on the submitted article. 2. Corrections or expansions to the submitted article in details. 3. Corrections or expansions to the submitted article in the core theme.
The ones I dislike are uninformed or overly emotional.
Sorry but some negative comments are necessary and very good for society. People constantly try to peddle lies in the media and on the internet for their own benefit.
The sooner those lies are shot down the better. I have been reading a lot of financial articles lately, and i have to say at least half of the financial editorials i see peddle some idea that is false and/or extremely harmful to anyone that believes it.
A critical mind is absolutely necessary to survive in modern society. And when one expresses critical thinking one is just helping others.
Of course as with anything one can always go overboard. Some people exhibit a type of reflexive negativity, they simply dismiss everything that is new and different without thinking much about it. I think PG called this "the middlebrow putdown." One should always consider things carefully before criticizing in public.
But saying negative comments are bad in general is just wrong.
The "middlebrow dismissal", yes. I don't think negative comments are bad, but I think our mental dials are set to 80% negative. In a way, we end up looking for reasons why something won't work, vs. why it could. That attitude tends to shut down discussion and iteration.
I don't really buy the theory of this all being due to the education systems of Western culture. In my 20 years of education there was very little emphasis on challenging ideas or proving them wrong. I'm almost tempted to say that there was absolutely none. But as you can see from this very message, I'm totally happy to write a knee-jerk negative reply.
What I believe is really happening is that it's hard for a yes-man to add any value to the conversation. "What great points you have! Totally agree! +1" is going to be just noise. It takes a large amount of effort to simultaneously agree and add something to the original article. In contrast it's very easy to add value by pointing out any parts that are actually wrong, or by highlighting areas of disagreement since that's likely where the meat of the issue lies. (Of course there's going to be a threshold at which the value of pointing out errors is lower than the cost of the reply aggregated across all readers, such as pointing out insignificant typos or grammar mistakes).
Finally, I strongly disagree with this: "But pointing out all the places other people are wrong rarely teaches us anything". It probably doesn't teach anything to the person who disagrees, since they hopefully are already familiar with whatever issue they're disagree with. But it does teach something to others. And a place where people go to learn but nobody teaches sounds pretty miserable.
> In my 20 years of education there was very little emphasis on challenging ideas or proving them wrong. I'm almost tempted to say that there was absolutely none.
In your 20 years of education you were never asked to write an essay? Or invited to partake in a class debate about this or that thing in a piece of literature?
Needing to present a cogent argument for whatever point you've chosen to make, sure. Being told to rip apart someone else's argument just for the purpose of disagreeing? Never.
> The cynical explanation for this is that people write negative comments to
> show off how clever they are or how much they know. But I don’t think
> that’s enough to explain how dedicated many commenters are to posting
> negative feedback. Instead, I think people do it because they believe it’s
> the right thing. Our cultural obsession with critical thinking compels us
> to point out errors when we perceive them; errors are injustices that we
> must right.
That explains why we tend to be so critical online, but I would expand upon the theory as to why we tend to do so so often.
Most of the web falls into three categories: Trying to Get Page Views, Trying to Sell You Something, or Trying to Proselytize. Just looking at the front page of HN, many story titles are intentionally vague, if not inflamatory. Read any thread on reddit, and many comments try to filter or twist facts to support an opinion rather than make an insight. Whether you call it mediaspeak, doublespeak, or bulshytt, it is still an offensive tactic for attention at the cost of truth, and our cognitive capacity is a resource worth defending.
> I think this in part explains why the Hacker School community is so much
> more positive than the world at large: People come here firstly to learn
> new things, not to dispute them. This suggests an interesting question:
> Could you build a site like Hacker News with a community focused on
> learning above all else?
If it is possible, the system would need to go beyond current implementations of moderation that boil down to "up/down, flag/don't flag" and address the difference between disagreement and fact-checking (slashdot tried this by differentiating between "insightful, interesting, and informative"). I also suspect it would take a moderation team that vigilantly replaces link-bait summary articles with original sources and carefully considers the validity of paid content or opinion pieces.
Tangential Postscript: I would pay money for a news site like HN or /. that focused exclusively on news, information, and data. Nothing is worse than the almost-daily links we get from someone who thinks they know how to improve a business, technology, or process, but offers no hard data to back up their ideas or observations. Hypothesis is fine in comments, but I expect a bit more from articles.
Incidentally, I think this in part explains why the Hacker School community is so much more positive than the world at large: People come here firstly to learn new things, not to dispute them. This suggests an interesting question: Could you build a site like Hacker News with a community focused on learning above all else?
Sigh.
I have no idea how big this Hacker School community is, but I imagine it is a good bit smaller than the traffic one sees on Hacker News. It is much, much, much easier to have a "positive" atmosphere when you have a community of under roughly 150 active members. I have seen stats that suggest that Internet forums typically have about 10% of the community very active and another 10% intermittently active and the rest lurkers. So, my experience has been that at around 700 members or so, you hit that roughly 150 mark of active members, above which you start seeing spin off communities, sub-communities and so on as some of the ways the community copes with having exceeded normal human bandwidth for community-making (based on the size of some brain part, etc).
This post strikes me as being written by someone who has zero appreciation for the sheer scale of Hacker News. It felt a LOT more like a real community when I initially joined it several years ago. In recent months, it seems to me it is a bit more female-friendly, and I suspect there are multiple reasons why it is evolving in that direction. So there are some good points and bad points, but it seems it has not managed to return to that same sense of community it once had.
The fact of the matter is that in all of human history, being able to bring together so very many people from such diverse backgrounds in real time is unprecedented. It should hardly shock people that this involves a high degree of friction and a fundamental need to invent new ways to interact, new cultural paradigms that have some hope of keeping things in that zone of warm sense of community. I think Hacker News is a victim of it's own success. It's sheer scale and level of traffic make this challenging. That doesn't mean it cannot be done. But that does mean it is kind of crappy to thump your own chest and brag about your pet theory as to why your undoubtedly much smaller community is running more smoothly at this time than Hacker News.
As a writer of critical comments of "hacker" school, I think this is typical of the times. If you call out somebody you are dismissed as a debbie-downer, cynical asshat, or other things like that. This comes from a culture now dominated by PR/marketing/sales, getting crazier by the growing viral marketing and astroturfing craze.
I strongly recommend you to watch Smile or Die, a talk by Barbara Ehrenreich.
The parallel with that is a delusion SOLD to the community. In the case of "hacker" school I criticize it as I did with the "MBA" program by Seth Godin. And I consider that I might be _completely_ wrong in both cases, but what is telling is how aggressive people got with me for speaking up my opinion.
May I differ with my opinion? That's the point of my comment. Thanks for the downvotes proving my point.
Edit: clarifying, I got very, very angry replies and dozens of downvotes at the time. Monoculture leads to fixed mindset and drives smart people away.
Edit 2: I didn't downvote you (I prefer words in this case). My comment was in the negative when you replied, but surprisingly it's risen to positive. Thank you, whoever you are. This gives me hope on HN community.
Generally speaking, "calling someone out" is being a debbie-downer and/or cynical asshat. If you're calling someone out, then by definition you are not voicing a disagreement with a particular perspective, you are attacking an individual.
Whenever I disagree with someone, I try really hard to come across as "the thing that you are saying is wrong" instead of "you are wrong". The former is a statement about a belief, the latter is a statement about a person. It's human nature to have a reflexive, defensive reaction to someone if you think they're attacking you rather than something you said.
I wish you kids would use "summary:" instead of "tl;dr"
though kudos for putting it at the beginning rather than the end.
I mean this in a friendly constructive way, and realize you may not be a kid. But while there's lots of positive innovation happening in culture and esp related to the Internet, I feel strongly that "tl;dr" is not one of them, its a step backward. It's typically placed in the worst possible location (the very end rather than the very top/beginning) and it's far less likely to be understandable than "summary". It's also reinventing the wheel. Again, not a criticism of your comment, meant more for other readers, esp younger or less educated ones, who don't know about the word summary and how it is traditionally used to solve the need well already. :-)
I actually find tl;dr to be more immediately dismissive in tone (and therefore occasionally negative, whether it is intended to be or not). A summary implies you actually read something and are trying to boil it down.
>Here’s a theory for why there are so many negative comments on the Internet: We train people to write them.
I agree.
>Indeed, Western culture trains us to disagree as part of learning to be critical thinkers.
I disagree.
I don't think Western culture teaches critical thinking at all. My wife just took a Critical Thinking course at college. I never took such a thing in all my years of schooling. The key to Critical Thinking, if anything, is to develop in oneself the ability to not react automatically, and to start from a position of no-bias.
On the other hand, any child who has ever sat in a Western class room knows that many teachers (for some children, all their teachers) "teach" by asking students a question and then telling them they are wrong.
I think the fundamental problem, however, is fantasy vs reality. I find I do this with my development team: I have this idea in my head of what the product should look like; I ineffectively deliver this vision to my team; the team delivers (well) on this ineffective vision; I berate them for what is wrong with it. I, in my role as teacher, perpetuate the awful process, by teaching it to my team as I learned it from my teachers.
It is hard to turn fantasies into reality through communication. We have learned to solve this through "trial and error", with an emphasis on "error".
Perhaps changing the conversation from, "This sucks! This isn't at all what I wanted!" to "This is great! Now how about if it does this...!"
On the topic of negative comments, this article prompts me to leave what the author assuredly would consider one. Frankly, if our society fails in education it's that students make it through without acquiring critical thinking skills.
The idea that we are critical because "it’s so much easier to challenge other people’s thinking than our own" is hard to take. If anything, this speaks to a failure to be self-critical more than a surplus of outward negativity.
More generally, I'm frustrated by what I see as an increasing tendency of people to parse the world into "positive" and "negative". This by itself speaks to a lack of truly critical thinking.
Further, I believe that the idea that critically taking apart other ideas is somehow a fundamentally distinct activity from developing one's own ideas is incorrect. In mathematics you develop ideas precisely by searching for what might be unsatisfying in the arguments and theories of others. And most successful start-ups seem to have some roots in looking at how what others are doing is sub-optimal.
This is related to something I occasionally think about.
I used to take a lot of pride in 'critical' thought. Certainly I frequently take this attitude toward the things floating around in my head, and I like that.
But I've learned not to do the same for ideas from others, especially in short comments on the internet, where it's basically a given that the other didn't fully express themselves anyway.
'critical' thought isn't all there is. 'constructive' thought is important too; maybe even more important. It's easy to be a critic and find 10 things wrong with another idea. It's harder, riskier, but more rewarding to then prioritize which of those 10 things should be worked out first and in what way.
If someone throws out a half baked idea. You can critique it. Most people stop there. But you can also continue forward and construct on top of it, propose changes, make it better.
I now try now to be not just critical but constructive in most parts of my life.
Another factor: people with negative moods have marginally more time to comment, and more need for the affirmation of quick-reactions (positive or negative) – feeding a cycle of adverse selection on the most-active threads.
For individuals, negative comments might be ego-boosting to write and heart-breaking to read. We cannot deny that many people write negative comments for less than healthy reasons, and that many others suffer psychologically as a result of such comments.
As a society, on the other hand, negative comments are indispensible for maintaining a balanced conversation, protecting human rights, and generally improving the state of our civilization.
> Western culture trains us to disagree as part of learning to be critical thinkers.
And that's one of the most important reasons why liberal democracy has such a hard time taking root in other cultures.
In (idealized) Western courtrooms, it's the job of each attorney to try to tear apart every single thing that the other attorney says. It's unpleasant, of course. It often wastes time and resources. But it's the only way we've found so far to make sure that the process as a whole reaches a balanced conclusion. It's our worst solution except all the others.
Like the market economy, the power of this process comes from the fact that it harnesses the power of human selfishness for the greater good. Really, it's genius. The system is not only fault-tolerant (where "fault" means moral fault), it actually thrives on the faults of its participants.
A society that treats negative comments as a taboo will stagnate and go corrupt. Because you can't eliminate selfishness, cynicism, and blind spots from human nature. To pretend that such traits don't exist, or even worse, to try to suppress them, is bound to fail. (Yeah, we tried that with human sexuality.) The only solution is to acknowledge that we are often selfish, cynical, and partially blind, and to channel that energy into productive use.
> writing negative comments feels good: It exercises our critical thinking skills without challenging anything we hold dear ... pointing out all the places other people are wrong rarely teaches us anything.
Exactly. And when I do that, it's YOUR job to challenge what I hold dear by exercising your critical thinking skills. At the end of the day, we can both learn! The more we do this to one another, the better it will be for all of us. Learning by criticism is not an individual task, it's a social project.
Of course, some people can't handle this. Ever been to DeviantArt? Everybody there praises everyone else's work all the time, no matter how shitty it is. Given the delicate sensibilities of a certain demographic that frequents DeviantArt, this policy probably saves lives. But should we all act like emo teenagers just because some of us behave like emo teenagers?
Is the author trying to say only people who agree should write comments? The whole point of a discourse is to discuss various sides of an issue. Life would be boring if everyone agreed
Of course comments are going to be mostly negative. Including this one.
HN doesn't really have a problem with vacuous comments like "this is great" or "this is shit" which are equally as bad as each other since they add nothing of value. Those get downvoted. Commenters shouldn't be putting people down without saying anything constructive, but it's not our job to bolster anyone's ego with boundless support and positivity either.
The main purpose of comments is to provide criticism, or point out things that are similar that others might be interested in as a follow-up on a good article.
As a result that's going to come across as either negative (picking holes, focusing on what's wrong - since that's what criticism mainly consists of), or derisory (this isn't new, here's a bunch of similar stuff). In both cases there may not be any intention of malice or even a negative tone to the comment, but unless the author sugar-coats everything by adding weasel phrases like "this is awesome but...", it's going to come across as negative by default.
Comments can also contain questions, which can often read as criticism/negativity. E.g. "why does this exist when there is already Foo?". How one chooses to interpret comments like these is up to the reader. I find it's best to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to poor communication.
It's always nice to see or be able to comment along the lines of "this is awesome and here's why it's awesome" in a way that the explanation adds some value. But usually it's just redundant fluff and more ego stroking.
The reason these comments are less common isn't because western culture is broken, the education system is broken, or because the illuminati wants to oppress us by keeping us all demotivated. It's just because the opportunity for insightful, positive comments is much rarer than the opportunity for insightful, negative comments.
Positivity is nice and all, but I'd rather have zero comments than waste my time reading dozens of "this is great" me-too comments. Insightfulness is a million times more important than positivity.
It's not about people showing off how clever they are, it's about commenters doing what commenters are supposed to do: provide commentary and criticism that adds value. If you want to immerse yourself in positive comments, there are plenty of Reddit circlejerks that do just that. HN is not that. If you think HN is negative, try reading Slashdot for a month instead. You'll appreciate just how good HN comments really are when you come back.
i think that when we type, we use a different part of the brain than when we speak. I have no evidence to back this up but sure as hell know that people won't say half the crap they spew on youtube etc.
I actually find the "negative" comments refreshing on YC. Youtube comments are the bane of existence...
I've seen countless instances where an anecdote is perfectly reasonable and interesting by itself, yet the anecdote itself is denigrated or at least devalued. [1] I don't like it. I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to have research at arms length in the general case.
When I click a link on hacker news and end up on a project page, it’s generally all positive. You go to some new kickstarter and you don’t see “This product I want to build is alright.” You see “This new thing I’ve got is AMAZING!”. Every startup landing page tells you, at length, why it’s the best thing since sliced bread. Most github project list off all the things they’re good for.
When I click on an HN project link, I generally get a page telling me how awesome that project is.
So when I go back to the comments afterwards, I want a counterpoint. I’d like a list of things wrong with the glowing self-review I just read. I handful of “Gee, that’s nifty!” comments might be nice, but they don’t really help me evaluate the thing I just read about, and they’re not terribly useful for fostering interesting discussion.
This isn’t as critical for some software products where I can reasonably evaluate their merit on my own, but there are a lot of areas where I’m not an expert. If some post comes along with a tool that it claims will revolutionize farming, I’d love to have someone with a strong agriculture background come by and explain why it’s not nearly as good as advertised.
Of course, there’s a long ways between “this is shit!” and “This is neat, but here are some flaws.” I’m all for criticism being constructive, rather than destructive, but let’s not throw out useful negativity. When people put up sites telling me how awesome something is, it’s quite valuable to have reasonably well informed people arguing the other side.