[Peroni]

>most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic.

This is addressed in OPs post. The vast majority of the 'negativity' I encounter on HN is technical critique rather than criticism or toxicity. I've found HN to arguably be one of the least toxic communities.

[f1shy]

I have seen pretty toxic comments in many political threads. Specially in threads of political that have nothing to do with technology in any way.

BTW even being the least toxic leaves the bar still pretty low, if you ask me.

[worksonmine]

There's a reason those kinds of posts are considered off-topic here. Polarized subjects quickly get ugly and toxic, people tend to turn off their brains and just react rather than trying to understand the other perspective. It's a shame, I enjoy discussing those topics, especially with people I disagree with. But it's almost impossible on the internet.

[f1shy]

Not so off topic. About 2 weeks ago, I commented in such an article saying I humbly don’t think is an appropriate topic for HN, and I was downvoted to hell in a hurry…

[vpribish]

most of your comments start by objecting to the person you reply to - that sets most people on edge and they are likely punishing you for your tone as much as the content

[0xbadcafebee]

We could have positive discourse on polarized subjects, but the forum doesn't want that. We are artificially limited here in many ways. If the forum were changed, it could be a lot easier to direct conversations in a constructive way. But it's currently designed for mass-appeal and engagement.

[pixl97]

>but the forum doesn't want that

Who is the forum exactly?

>But it's currently designed for mass-appeal and engagement.

Are you talking about hacker news? Your description confuses me in relation to the site you are on.

I'd like to see you expand on how one would remove the artificial limitations without massively increasing the administrative/moderative workload.

[0xbadcafebee]

Yes I'm talking about HN.

First of all, there are famously no real sub-sections of HN, it's just this one "home page" with 30 "stories" that are voted on by 5 million people (unique monthly viewers), and a couple other ways to sort or view the same stories based on some algorithm. So it's nearly impossible to have discussions here unless it falls into a very broad category. Therefore the discussions are broad, the opinions are broad, the reactions are broad. You have a lot of people talking past each other, arguing over nothing, reinforcing false beliefs, etc.

Second, like Reddit and its other "story-specific discussion" brethren, there is no ongoing conversation, like older forums, so all discourse has to be topical, temporary, and based around a specific piece of media and set of positions. People get trapped in debates over false premises, presented bad information, and can't reference other discussions or pick up where one left off. There is no memory or continuous conversation, so every new story is nearly random in what will be discussed, what opinions will become dominant, what group rides in to take over the thread.

Third, the site is filled with algorithms to filter, optimize, weight, and otherwise alter what content shows up on the front page. It is a highly curated, highly artificial environment, serving the purposes of YC to gather users with which to funnel potential founders into its startup machine. This is a business and we are the product, and we are being honed and shaped according to a very particular set of interests, priorities, goals. A sort of 'ideal world' according to a very small number of people.

Fourth, there's as many moderators for all of HN as there is for the average Subreddit, yet 10x as many users here. It would be trivial to simply acquire more volunteer moderators. But I believe they want to keep tight control on moderation in order to ensure they shape narratives, behaviors and culture in a specific way.

Fifth, the technology of the user interface hasn't advanced past what was available in the 90's. Besides the lack of topics/categories, tags, customization of the feed, and no way to provide feedback other than up/down vote. This is intentional in order to force the culture YC wants. But it makes it difficult to have more nuanced discussions. For example, the "up/down" vote button could easily expand to more specific reactions, ala Slashdot's moderation modifiers (Troll, Flamebait, Offtopic, Redundant, Overrated, Underrated, Funny, Informative, Interesting, Insightful, Normal). Going further, votes could have emotional modifiers (Angry, Scared, Confused, Excited) and intellectual modifiers (Incorrect, Misleading, Stupid, Correct, Factual, Agreed). The addition of this intellectual and emotional context would allow users to provide more feedback to the comments they're voting on, which helps guide users in their discourse as well as shape the culture towards more intelligent discourse. But without these signals, there is no way to divine what an upvote or downvote means, so it becomes an incredibly poor signal. The only way to know if a story is a shit-show or not is to compare total upvotes to total comments, as a majority of comments indicates a lot of emotional, uneducated people trying to force their opinion on everyone else.

This could be improved if those people could provide more context to their feedback, or the discussion continued past the initial story in a more nuanced way. But there is no way to solve this as every single story is another battle that everyone feels like they have to fight over again, because ground is never won, nuance never captured, education impossible. This forum is designed to force people to come back to reassert whatever they already believe, or argue to perpetuate it, which keeps engagement high.

[throwaway2037]

I find the most emotionally negative content on HN is about public education. There are so many people who were personally affected by poor schooling in their youth and cannot resist to add their (usually unhelpful and uninsightful) two cents to the discussion. So many of these negative comments are paint with a very broad brush, like: "Public schools are terrible in state X." It is so general as to be useless.

Years ago, when I was young, I noticed a trend watching local TV news: Whenever they would interview people on the street, past a certain age, their comments become so much more negative. Example: "So, how is traffic in your part of town? Oh, it's never been worse." "How are the public schools? Oh, it's never been worse." Ad nauseam. Whenever I feel any conversation in my life is drifting into "Oh, it's never been worse.", I tune out.

[matthewfcarlson]

Salty but not mean is how I put it

[gjsman-1000]

In my opinion; the technical critique is often thin, an edge case at most, or something overly pedantic; solely to make a negative claim.

“The sky is blue.”

“Technically speaking, no; it’s just a reflection, and at night it’s basically black, so you’re wrong even the majority of the time!”

As such I still completely back that article years ago calling this place lovably toxic. It’s gotten worse since then.

[IggleSniggle]

I simply choose to believe that people do this out of a place of genuine curiosity / excitement to share knowledge. I believe this approach of assuming the best of intentions is even in the HN guidelines! Or maybe it was just the old Reddit ones from long long ago when Reddit was more like what HN is now. Either way, maintaining the background assumption, even when it is challenging to do so, makes HN a far more pleasant place to inhabit.

[mrweasel]

I do run into the overly pedantic stuff pretty frequently, people will often latch on to some minor point or detail, maybe because it's easier to comment on?

Deep technical critique often can't be in the comments, in my opinion. Unless you're an expert, setting up the environment, doing the experiments and presenting the data is an entire article on it's own. It would probably be healthier if people did that, rather than typing out a quick comment.

Then there are topics like how AI will influence society in general, that's a multi-year sociology study, before being able to say anything with just a hint of accuracy. Warnings based on sentiment and anecdotes will always register as negative.

There are some articles that have 200+ comments, in those cases whatever you have to say has probably already been posted, but people like to vent their frustrations, sometimes it helps to type out your thoughts, even if no one will read them.

[7777777phil]

The classifiers I used are definitely conflating technical criticism with genuine negativity, and that's a real limitation. When I say "technical critique reads differently than personal attacks," I probably should have been clearer that the models aren't making that distinction well.

[acessoproibido]

Compared to how bad online discourse has gotten pretty much anywhere else in the meantime, it's still really good here. Only place I can stomach for extended periods

[stuartjohnson12]

This is SUCH a good example of pedantry and will become my new primary example. All too often, people think of pedantry as being along the magnitude of scale. The "rational" pedant's response to this is to use quantitative jargon and bayes to scale up the size of the nitpick.

[cheschire]

So you're arguing that technically the technical critique is not valuable by yourself arguing on technicalities of the technical critique. Oh the irony! But you're not wrong. ;)

[tux3]

Technically speaking, it's not a reflection, it's Rayleigh scattering. So you're wrong, even the majority of the time! :)

[gjsman-1000]

Exactly; but rarely is this done for curiosity or accuracy; but instead for veiling toxicity.

This place drowns in veiled toxicity.

“Grass is green”

“But I live in California and we have a drought, and the entire concept of green grass is a waste of valuable water resources, and was frankly always a sign of privilege because only someone with excess freshwater can do it, and we need that freshwater for starving kids in Africa, and if Boomers hadn’t been so obsessed with single family housing and urban sprawl…”

[acessoproibido]

>drowns in veiled toxicity

I don't really disagree but given the massive tsunami of outright _vileness_ that has engulfed all other online soaces it's holding up remarkably well

[giraffe_lady]

This remains the best general description imo:

> The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness. Ill-advised citations proliferate; thought experiments abound; humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational. Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral positions. The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns.

From the new yorker's profile of dang a few years ago. It doesn't specifically address the negativity but it contains it, if you get what I mean.

Also I mean you know you, personally, are one of the worst about this right? I only recognize a handful of usernames here and yours is one for exactly this reason.

[TimorousBestie]

It really bums me out that you’re apparently still rate-limited, I always appreciate a giraffe-lady thread.

[gjsman-1000]

I recognize your name very well for the exact same reason, touché.

[giraffe_lady]

Do you consider yourself an ideologue, an honest propagandist? I do for myself, I don't profess any particular devotion to these ideals of rhetoric or debate. I just consider them tools to accomplish goals, that may be laid aside at will or need. I think frankly most people here also do they just don't admit it.

[mstipetic]

There’s a lot of pedantry as well

[cloverich]

It bugs me but also it comes with the territory - HN attracts an awful lot of programmers, and most programmers skew hard to pedantry (more specifically, noticing and correcting minute details). I'd love the exact same community minus the pedantry, but if losing the pedantry costs the programmers, but am not sure how possible that is (without more sophisticated moderation).

[PaulHoule]

Less toxic than Twitter and clones for sure.

[rmoriz]

It‘s worthwhile to mention „clones“ because Mastodon/Fediverse and bsky turned into the same negativity sinkholes just with a different group. Builders and creators quickly became the minority, as it happend on Twitter within 3-4 years after launch.

[PaulHoule]

I'll grant that.

I am active on Mastodon, Bluesky, and Tumblr but not X. On all of those platforms I am selective about who I follow (e.g. said anything about Trump in the last 20 posts I won't follow you, posted an image with angry text in it, I won't follow you) and quick with the block button. In the case of the first two I get a feed which is really cozy, the third has way too much AI slop (fake cat videos!) which would get the smackdown on the other too.

I really enjoy sharing photos on that kind of platform as well as the kind of links I post to HN. I did have an image that was a breakout hit the other day which got me a burst of follows and it was really depressing that 95%-ish of those new followers are people who are apoplectic about #uspol. There are just so many of those people and they post so much and they always say the same things and I find it emotionally contagious.

I am bothered less by the right wing equivalent of those people because I don't go on X, I live in one of the most liberal towns in America. They bother me less because I can easily dismiss the people who are bleating "free speech", "free speech", "freespeech" as NPC minions of Peter Thiel [1] whereas I agree with the followers of Heather Cox Richardson about the problem but think their solution is so wrong and actually destructive to their cause that they are effectively working for the Koch Organization for free and for me that stings.

[1] ... although I know I shouldn't.

[rmoriz]

1. Follow people who deliver. Deliver code, arts, thoughts, ideas, change.

2. Ignore the cultists of all sides, ignore the people who fall into every rage bait trap or just want to start a cult. Almost nobody is right or wrong all the time except people who outright hate all people and have no empathy.

3. Even when you follow a person, treat them with a big grain of salt. Everyone is an influencer, many have some underlying agenda or questionable views. Be reluctant to share, be reluctant of trusting in topics people are not known for. Your three letter guy sure knows A LOT about code, business and getting things done, however his view on politics may be dubious. You need to be able to accept that both at the same time.

[taeric]

Exactly the kind of standard I love to hold myself to. :D

[mbesto]

Agreed. I for one would not want to be involved in a message board full of people constantly saying "yaa you're great, this is great!".

Constructive criticism isn't toxic and is incredibly valuable.

[giancarlostoro]

Except when its political talk in any way, which we try to avoid, but when it bleeds through from time to time, it can be all over the place on HN.