[throwaway2041]

Someone said this in the congratulations thread, but I think the salient point is that BrandonM's comment was upvoted highly, not that it was particularly offensive.

Hacker News has a strong negativity bias. Most of the time the top voted comment is a snarky takedown of the post. Especially in the earliest days of startups, its far better to be a cheerleader on the outside than a cynic (unless the startup is unethical). It's just so hard to build successful companies, and so easy to dismiss things at that early stage.

And yes, I know this very comment is deeply ironic in a way

edit: thanks for down-voting me OP!

[dang]

In my experience it's more of a pushback or contrarian dynamic. The first wave of comments tends to be negative as people object to the article (unless it's particularly interesting, which is the case we hope for), and the second wave tends to be positive as people object to the objections.

You're right about the upvoting though. Bad upvotes are a bigger problem than bad comments. ('Bad' here means 'not helping with intellectual curiosity and civility'). If you put that together with the pushback thing, it explains a curious phenomenon: why at the top of so many active threads sits a comment saying "I can't believe how negative the comments are here". It sounds self-contradictory but it's not, because there are multiple generations of comments. That's a pushback comment attracting a lot of pushback upvotes.

[classicsnoot]

I don't have the ability to downvote. What is more, I upvoted it, and with the account I always use, as opposed to a throwaway account, which you decided to use for some reason. That is the ironic part of your post.