Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
The guidelines still apply, even if you feel negatively towards a project and its creator. Indeed it's even more important to make the effort to heed the guidelines for topics you feel negatively towards (after all, it's easy to be respectful about things we feel positively towards).
Thanks for explaining, is this mostly about replying directly to the person involved in the project? Compared to e.g. a comment in a thread about OpenClaw without replying directly to the creator? Just trying to figure out where the line is, I do think snark is a valid form of criticism sometimes but it's your house after all.
That comment would be a guidelines breach on HN, whether or not it was in reply to the project creator. It gives off just the kind of negativity that HN has always aimed to avoid. Even if we don't always succeed in avoiding it, the guidelines represent an ideal that we work to uphold every day.
> Just trying to figure out where the line is
It's not really about a line, it's about the qualitative style of discussion we’re here for. HN is for people who like to build things and work on interesting new projects, and have curious conversations about what they're building. Projects that are new and built in different ways than what has come before will always be easy to criticise from a position of conformity to historical conventions, but if we all thought that way, nothing new would ever be built.
> I do think snark is a valid form of criticism sometimes
Not on HN. Thoughtful criticism is fine, and the very first two words of the “In Comments” section of the guidelines are “be kind”.
> but it's your house after all
That's not how we think about it. We’re custodians of this place and our role is to keep it a healthy place for discussion among intellectually curious hackers. It takes daily work and effort to uphold the guidelines and keep the standards up so that it doesn’t become the hellscape of negativity that it's often stereotyped as being.
For me I think this veers dangerously close to tone policing. I don't think you have to always be extremely civil in the face of what you consider moral bankruptcy. But I can also understand that it creates a vicious cycle so I can appreciate your position here.