Please don't respond to a bad comment with swipes and putdowns. HN is a statistical distribution across a wide spectrum of comments. The only helpful thing to do is to make sure your own contributions raise the median quality, rather than dragging it down further. Your comment would have been fine without the first sentence. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
> HN feedback has become cancer
It's all too easy to succumb to false feelings of generality about this kind of thing [1], because (a) there's a spectrum, as I mentioned, and (b) we're all inclined to notice the things we dislike, and weight them more heavily [2]. But these are all comments that other users posted to the same thread:
Those commenters all managed to offer positive feedback without combining it with negative generalizations about others. If you could do the same in the future, that would be very helpful.
Negative feedback (including yours, and mine, and that of those who may reply to this disagreeing with me) has its place.
I’ve seen forums (fora?) where almost everyone is exclusively positive (like some reddit look-what-I-made topics), and that well-intentioned behavior can be pretty unhelpful if you’re trying to get different perspectives on your own project.
Yet there are always people there who bend over backwards to make someone feel bad if the person was (sarcasm: rude enough) to suggest there may be a way to improve something. Enforcing the positivity-only social norms.
I’m glad that HN, by contrast, stands out as having more free range thinkers who tell it like it is.
This is wholly true, but the comment above makes absurd claims ("Smartphone/tablet? No one converts there! Want privacy? Use Debian!"), bending backwards to say something negative.
> HN feedback has become cancer
It's all too easy to succumb to false feelings of generality about this kind of thing [1], because (a) there's a spectrum, as I mentioned, and (b) we're all inclined to notice the things we dislike, and weight them more heavily [2]. But these are all comments that other users posted to the same thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30060780
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30049509
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30048458
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30047502
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30047488
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30047403
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30046427
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30050602
Those commenters all managed to offer positive feedback without combining it with negative generalizations about others. If you could do the same in the future, that would be very helpful.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...