[fmueller]

Why should this be wrong? People can be who they want to be. If something is cool it's appreciated, if it's not, it's been shit on. That's life, deal with it. Not everyone is made of porcelain. Some are able to deal with critisism even if it's not delivered like it's taught in management classes.

[dang]

This is a common objection that does carry some weight, but turns out not to hold in HN's context. In a large, semi-anonymous, weakly cohesive internet forum, the behavior referred to in this thread as "shitting" propagates into a force that's destructive of the community. The best people begin to leave, the shit piles up, and soon we're in a death spiral.

That's the #1 risk to HN, so we worry about it. Like many here, we've seen it happen before, and HN was literally founded on the idea of not letting it happen again—or at least trying to stave it off.

That doesn't mean we don't get the value of hard-hitting technical critique done in a right context; it means that HN is not a right context for the shitting variety. Nor do we ask users to be namby-pamby milquetoasts; we ask them to understand enough about the fragility of the community to preserve it for the future. We don't want a scorched-earth outcome.

So go ahead and make clear technical criticisms, but make them without the extra jabs that people often feel compelled to stick in. That latter behavior isn't hard technical critique anyhow, just chest-beating.