[pavlov]

I’ve always been advised to avoid these “sub-communities” like /r/javascript and Hacker News. Maintainers say they are filled with assholes who don’t know what they are talking about, angry idiots shouting at everything and everyone, cesspools, giant piles of trash burning in the wind.

Is HN really that bad? I mean, it must be, if people maintaining popular open source projects think so... But why does it feel much more useful to me than a "pile of trash burning in the wind"?

I guess my experience as a commenter is so different because I've learned to tune out the negative stuff and it's not aimed at me.

[OskarS]

Check out this comment from one of the devs behind Homebrew from HN 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13035438 (this was in response that he might be a good target to sue over putting Google Analytics in Homebrew).

Yes, we need to treat our open source devs better. HN is not innocent.

[pavlov]

Holy shit. That's just insane.

It feels like some people treat open source developers like government employees. Both provide a seemingly "free" service, and when you're not paying it's easy to ask for more and get upset about trivial things. (Of course neither group deserves this kind of thing.)

[wnevets]

>It feels like some people treat open source developers like government employees

This is actually a very interesting comparison.

[endisukaj]

> Both provide a seemingly "free" service

I'd argue that open source maintainers provide a free service. Government employees do not.

[pavlov]

Many prominent open source projects are supported and often initiated by corporations. I imagine Google pays the core Angular team quite well.

[endisukaj]

Of course. But most of the time users are not paying the maintainers whereas with government employees you are paying them through your taxes.

[emn13]

Well, that's hardly any different to google. You have no control over the details of those taxes. If anything, the advantage you grant google is likely more direct and quite probably more costly if you're comparing apples to apples. It's just really hard to compare those.

Don't forget, google gains quite a lot from giving away software like this, and some of their gain (in the form of control) may well be a cost to others - and it's not a zero sum game, so it's anyones guess whether it's a net positive or negative (even though that seems unlikely).

Similarly, you talk of the paying taxes as if this were some net-negative cost. There too this isn't a zero sum game - just because you distribute the costs but don't account for the benefits doesn't mean it's not net beneficial to you. The government is even larger than google (and indeed intertwined the the semi-fiction of currency), so "paying them" doesn't really mean the costs are much more direct than they are with granting google influence of the JS ecosystem.

Even if through voting you could choose the cease to "pay" for the government employees, the consequences might well be far-reaching and impact the currency system (hence "pay" in quotes), so from one point of view you can't with any reliability choose not to pay, rather, you can choose not to account for costs accrued by a large civilization. But it's highly questionable whether you can actually avoid those costs and remain a large civilization.

[pavlov]

I don't know. If you use Google products and see ads, you're indirectly paying for the development of Angular.

Not everyone who uses government services directly pays for them either (they might not have income or it might be less than the required minimum for federal/national tax, for example).

[JustSomeNobody]

What is wrong with these people? Why do they treat people like this? Why is it these people always seem to jump to the big three [0] in protest of something they don't like? Are they that childish they can't express themselves in a more humane and intelligent way?

One hears about this seemingly regularly. It needs to stop.

[0] Nazi, murder, rape

[mikemcquaid]

Thanks for bringing up this example and calling it out as unacceptable. I appreciate it (and I'm sure other OSS maintainers do too).

[OskarS]

No problem. It was so egregious and over the line that it really stood out. Your response was also really eye-opening, a thing that all of us who benefit so much from OSS needed to read and understand. Thank you for making it.

[michaelmrose]

Its a dick move clearly but the post was flagged, a hacker news moderator spoke directly to the issue saying the post was unacceptable, various others had a more productive positive discussion including calling out the negative poster.

You can even make a negative, frankly slightly whiny post calling hacker news a trash fire and STILL have a productive discussion here.

The human race is just chock full of assholes and if you make yourself visible by raising your head above the herd you will inevitably become the target for some of them. Each community of course should do what it can to promote a positive asshole free discussion but its still a semi free internet and assholes have email/irc/twitter accounts.

Beyond keeping it positive yourself which the author hasn't done you just have to deal with it and move on. If someone calls you terrible and you look in the mirror and know its not true then shrug it off and move on.

[striking]

He mentioned getting some egregiously awful comments, specifically over email. I quickly scrolled through the HN thread and didn't see many, not on "nazi" or "death threat" level.

Perhaps the people that read HN and then email other people are not innocent, but there's a huge gap between the number of people who comment on HN and the number of people who just read HN.

I think HN comment posters are generally innocent. I would guess that the storm came from elsewhere, or from particularly unscrupulous people who happen to read HN. Stuff like the mentioned subject ends up bringing out the paranoid people, which often causes some seriously unhinged commentary.

[moosingin3space]

The HN commenter literally threatened to sue the developer, even calling the developer a "good target". That sort of combative language is toxicity.

[striking]

The response to his comment was immediate, unanimous, and unequivocal.

HN mods responded, the comment was flagged and killed and downvoted to hell.

Also, the way it was written may not have been the way he intended to come across. Read dang's comment, as well as his downthread comment.

All things considered, HN is definitely not a bad place.

[mikemcquaid]

The mods did well there, I agree, but it was the top-voted comment for a fair while (most of the working day, European time). Perhaps that says something about European vs. American attitudes on such thing, I dunno (I'm European).

[moosingin3space]

> All things considered, HN is definitely not a bad place.

While I am very critical of many aspects of HN, I have had some excellent discussion here. I just wish it were more consistently good.

[striking]

I haven't had higher quality discussion with this many people anywhere else on the internet. Sometimes there are not so great comment threads, sometimes people decide to take things too seriously and fail to pick up on humor... but generally I think this is a great place.

[rohannair]

Many HN posts about JS devolve into a "I don't like Javascript because I'm a real programmer, not a frontend" slugfest.

As someone who is invested in the long-term success of the JS ecosystem, it becomes a lot easier just to remove yourself from the discussion because a lot of the community is so negative about the (older versions) of the language and ecosystem, purely on ideology.

[JustSomeNobody]

Oh. I thought it devolved into "Use react".

[sdegutis]

Both actually. Split roughly 50/50.

[zeveb]

> As someone who is invested in the long-term success of the JS ecosystem, it becomes a lot easier just to remove yourself from the discussion because a lot of the community is so negative about the (older versions) of the language and ecosystem, purely on ideology.

If a lot of people are so negative about it, is it worth even considering whether they might be correct? Is it not ideological to refuse to do so?

[dwaltrip]

You honestly believe people who build web apps with javascript are not "real programmers"? Would you like to elaborate on that?

It's not surprising that many find it offensive when people don't bother to differentiate between newbie programmers who have just learned the basics of jQuery and experienced front-end developers capable of building complex, well-architected applications.

[zeveb]

> You honestly believe people who build web apps with javascript are not "real programmers"

I didn't write that, nor do I believe. JavaScript is a programming language — albeit a truly awful one — and thus people who get work done in it are by definition really programmers. And some of them have done some really quite amazing things with it.

That doesn't change the fact that the success of JavaScript is an embarrassment for our profession.

Sometimes everyone is negative about something which really isn't all that bad. Negativity about JavaScript isn't one of those times.

[dwaltrip]

Hmm, I suppose the paragraph before the one you quoted was the more problematic one. I apologize for downvoting, I should have been more careful.

Although it may have helped if you would have made it clear you didn't agree with the paragraph prior to the one you quoted.

Regarding Javascript itself, yeah it has some warts. But modern Javascript (ES6) is actually not too bad. IMO, it really isn't that much worse than Python or Ruby (which I've used a good amount).

[spion]

JavaScript is pretty much average for a dynamic language.

Also, it doesn't matter how many people think its awful. What matters are the facts they present.

[qwertyuiop924]

Of course it's worth it: we've considered it, and we think you're wrong.

[striking]

Or not even just that one is particularly "wrong", but that it's a matter of opinion that is differently valid to different people. That's as much reasoning as you can do on the scale of an entire language, without getting more concrete about your arguments.

edit: also, "ideological" is unfair. We know JS isn't godlike. We use it regardless.

[qwertyuiop924]

That was more or less my point. So thanks for clarifying it.

[pcwalton]

> Is HN really that bad?

I recently had someone here say I should be given "a prison sentence of several decades" for working on Rust. And no, they were not joking.

To be fair, the comment in question got flagged off the site, but the point remains that it very much does happen here.

[SamReidHughes]

Whew! And by working on Rust you've already committed years of hard labor, you should at least get credit for time served.

[hvs]

I don't think HN is on the level of Reddit or some other communities, but there is an air of contrarianism that wafts through this place that I can imagine reads as negative to people that aren't familiar with it. It also sometimes outright vilifies certain projects.

[spacemanmatt]

There's some cultural and some technical elitism here, and you can taste it. It's available on other forums, but I think it's a touch stronger here. On the other hand, HN does a great job of shouting down trolls and truly ignorant (unresearched/uninformed) opinions. As such, I find a stronger S/N here despite the elitism. It's pretty easy to filter/calibrate for that than the trolling and sheer idiocy so pervasive in other venues.

[forgottenpass]

As such, I find a stronger S/N here despite the elitism.

Despite? I've only been on the internet for 15 years, but I thought elitism was the only way to increase s/n ratio.

I've seen elitism enforced through selecting _who_ can talk or _how_ the people talk to eachother. But I've never seen anything but "GOML" change interaction for the better. Even this "Dear Javascript" can be seen as a flavor of GOML.

[spacemanmatt]

Nosir, I often consider elitism part of the noise. It's just a particularly filterable part of the usual array of noise sources, though. And I recognize this is a subjective statement; YMMV.

[sidlls]

HN definitely has a strain of tech "fad following" and cult of personality going on, in my opinion. There are certain languages, frameworks, companies and individuals that, if one comments negatively about, will earn more than one down vote.

[throwanem]

> Is HN really that bad?

It seems like there are some people trying to drive it downhill in a hurry - I know it's fashionable for anyone who's been on HN for any time at all to say it's going downhill, but turn on showdead for a while and see if you don't start to feel the same.

[JustSomeNobody]

It is right there and I never knew it existed. Turned it on, got shocked by reading such nastiness, turned it back off.

The problem with negativity is that it takes much less effort to be negative than to be positive. And it's much more contagious.

[throwanem]

It is a bit From Beyond, isn't it? No Jeffrey Combs, though, more's the pity.

[to3m]

But this is why you leave showdead off.

[throwanem]

I leave it on because sometimes there's a comment which makes a salient point, isn't a dupe, and for whatever reason is dead anyway - maybe the user is shadowbanned, I don't know. I'd rather be able than not to see and vouch for such comments when they occur, but I certainly don't blame anyone for not wanting to see all the garbage that comes along with enabling showdead - which is most of what it lets you see, in any case.

[moron4hire]

Over the years, I've seen my own projects get torn apart or receive praise, and it feels like (though I certainly can't prove it) there is a direct correlation to how much I test before releasing.

Because we have such a wider audience on the Web, it's really hard to develop an experience that fits everyone's expectations. And everyone definitely has their own expectations, with almost no consideration that theirs isn't necessarily the majority position. I've had people on Internet Explorer for Windows Phone bitch me out for not supporting their platform. Unfortunately, their noise can cause an out-sized effect on other people's opinion on other platforms, so you can't easily say that it's not cost effective to support niche platforms. On the other hand, something like an iOS app has such a smaller market, such a smaller set of potential use cases, with much higher activation energy, that in comparison it's a cake walk.

The hard thing is that, if you're just starting out, you don't know what you don't know. I think it's possible to release a JS project that gets received well. But there are just so many things you have to take into consideration before releasing a project. I had started to write a list of considerations, but I quickly realized it was getting unwieldy fast and I don't want to be here all day. I think it all comes down to "make the technology transparent". People shouldn't know what you used to build your project unless they go to your Github repo and see it immediately in your README. And I mean that in both the sense that there should be negative consequences to your technology choices that bleed through to the user, as well as you should make no mention of it in your marketing materials. Because marketing material should be 100% focused on selling, and the technology used to build a thing is so very rarely ever a good selling point. At best, it's a distraction. At worst, you'll alienate people for no good reason.

Put another way, it's hard enough to get people to show up, don't hand them excuses to leave. We get told to "release early, release often" a lot. And I believe in that concept very wholeheartedly. But it's in regards to features, not to defects. Work your TODO list until there are no known defects.

HN is definitely a lot better than Reddit, though. Reddit is random, as far as I can tell. Whomever is the first poster gets to set the tone for the thread, and then it's just piling on after that, usually devolving into inside-jokes repeating sound-bites (which are expressly forbidden here and/or will get you down-voted to hell)

[ww520]

HN can be pretty bad.

[FlorianRappl]

I agree, but I was quite surprised to see it being mentioned alongside some quite uneducated, brutal, bash-only communities. I always had the feeling that in any discussion on HN something new to learn pops up.

Besides that as an active OSS contributor I fully understand and support the author's points.