[grecy]

Thanks for this comment.

The Internet in general, and HN lately, have become extraordinarily negative places full of comments trashing people who try to do things that are bold.

I wish people would have a little optimism, or at least just say things like "wow, I personally don't think it's possible, but damn it's going to be exciting to watch them try".

We need people who are working hard to build a better future, so lets not bury them in a pile of hate and negativity.

[martythemaniak]

I too am sick and tired of this zeitgeist and I hope it passes soon, because otherwise I think people will just tune out until every only community is nothing but a hateful cesspool.

Musk and Tesla attract more than the average share of hate, but this sentiment feeds on itself and grows like cancer. Yesterday's thread on Eric Schmidt leaving Google was dozens of people competing to see who could trash him better.

Apart from the bad effects of negativity itself, it is also supremely boring. HN's comments are slowly going from being able to find tons of interesting ideas/reactions/perspectives to finding only different ways of trashing the same person/company/idea.

[Klathmon]

There's a growing list of topics I just entirely avoid online now, and it's a damn shame because I enjoy most of them.

Cryptocurrencies, "smart" things or IoT, anything Google related, anything even slightly related to or made by Facebook (the other day Facebook released info on their rewrite of Facebook.com and zero comments were about the tech on HN, it was just a bunch of people arguing over how awful Facebook really is), and many things that deal with JavaScript (at least on HN).

Sadly I'm going to be adding Tesla to that list now, something I should have done years ago, at least on this website.

Every topic related to those things quickly devolves into a bunch of people just yelling at each other over semantics, and it's very hard to have any real nuanced discussion.

[grecy]

I completely agree with you and the parent comment.

It's like people now come online to just loudly scream their opinion about something, then leave.

Whether a tech person likes or loaths Facebook is not really of interest or any gain to us as a community. Like you said, it would be massively interesting to learn exactly what tech and how facebook are re-writing their app, but those conversations don't even happen on HN anymore.

It's amazing to think what the state of automobiles and driving will be in 5 and then 10 years (which is really not far away at all), and yet every single discussion thread just argues about the demise of Tesla instead of discussing, planning for and building the future that is inevitable, with or without Tesla.

> Every topic related to those things quickly devolves into a bunch of people just yelling at each other over semantics, and it's very hard to have any real nuanced discussion.

As much as I hate censorship, I think the moderation team at HN would be wise to shadow ban (or just outright ban) accounts that post negative rubbish, or simply expose their opinion on a topic.

Maybe there should be a rule that a person's opinion is off-limits in HN discussions. Discuss the topic at hand, but don't just cram opinions down throats. (yes, I get the irony, I'm expressing my opinion here)

[c0vfefe]

Perhaps people are beginning to look at the downsides of innovation at all costs. Tesla's and Google's technical contributions can't be divorced from their failings. I'd think this would be a refreshing shift in startup culture.

[stcredzero]

I wish people would have a little optimism, or at least just say things like "wow, I personally don't think it's possible, but damn it's going to be exciting to watch them try".

Uninformed optimism? Not so much. How about some charity and informed, insightful analysis?

We need people who are working hard to build a better future, so lets not bury them in a pile of hate and negativity.

Agreed. By the same token, we can ditch the hate and have more informed negativity when it's warranted. It's mental laziness to just slam the lever all the way up because you like the feel of "up," or to slam it all the way down, just because you think "down is cool." The difficult and valuable thing is to move the lever to where it needs to go through technique and good judgement.

[grecy]

> How about some charity and informed, insightful analysis?

I agree, that would be great. Let's analyze stuff instead of just screaming out our opinions.

> we can ditch the hate and have more informed negativity when it's warranted

How does negativity (even informed negativity) help us?

How does it increase our knowledge, or ability to do new exciting things, or our ability to "push the envelope"?

It doesn't. It's a waste of time and effort. Worst case, just say nothing at all rather than being negative about a certain topic.

When working on an extremely complicated problem the last thing in the world anyone needs is a bunch of people reminding them it's really hard and that nobody has done it before and that it's going to fail for reasons x,y,z.

Remember, every breakthrough that has ever happened had a long list of reasons why it was "impossible".

[Robotbeat]

What's needed in the skeptic analysis is people who actually understand the point Elon is making. So often, the skeptics just completely don't understand what he's saying as he's speaking in terms of limits and fundamental principles, i.e. as a physicist.

In any good discussion and healthy argument, it is critical to be able to understand your opponent's point, be able to restate it accurately in a way they'd agree with, before being able to point out exactly how it's wrong (or at least unlikely).

Instead, we often see pile-ons and other supremely mentally lazy attacks.

[stcredzero]

How does it increase our knowledge, or ability to do new exciting things, or our ability to "push the envelope"?

It keeps resources from being wasted that would otherwise actually contribute to our ability to "push the envelope."

It doesn't. It's a waste of time and effort.

When something which really is impossible or impractical is called out, then huge amounts of resources can be redirected to genuinely beneficial projects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obS6TUVSZds

Are you advocating that we never doubt? Should we just "listen and believe" and somehow our positive energy will make things happen? Sorry, no. Scientific analysis has predictive power. That's what Elon Musk is all about.

[yourapostasy]

> ...and HN lately, have become extraordinarily negative places full of comments trashing people...

Considering that one of the tenets of good engineering cultures is blame-free environments, this negativity around ambitious engineering goals astounds me.

[grecy]

Me too. It's really sad, to be honest. HN used to be a place to come and learn really cool stuff, and I enjoyed the comments section much more than the articles themselves.

Now, the comments are hardly worth a glance.

[drb91]

It’s really hard to be optimistic when the good these companies do is bound by the same market dynamics that feed many of the crises we face today. I don’t like Musk, but I’m at worst neutral about the companies; what would optimism look like here in the best case scenario for carbon impact? SpaceX is cool but I don’t see it as the shortest route to solving any major problem we have. Same with the boring company—the impact will not be in the places that are facing a crisis. Sometimes it feels like optimism here is distracting from very hard problems. That’s not the fault of any single people or group of people it’s just the way the world works.

I really agree about the tone thing, these conversations are toxic and unproductive.

It might help if we stop referring to rich people as bold—it is honestly difficult to spend the type of capital Musk has access to, and he would have to intentionally give it away to be poor. What’s the risk? Not a risk most can empathize with.

[olivermarks]

why is Tesla's public face almost exclusively Musk? There are hundreds of talented people there taking huge risks, I personally find Musk as annoying as Donald Trump. There are a lot of people at Tesla risking a lot to do something bold. I'd like to hear a lot more from them and a lot less from Musk.