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> HN posters tend to be overly critical, often tripping over themselves to demonstrate

That's the helpful part though, as one of the only communities that is overly critical instead of too much on the other end of the spectrum like every other community. Criticism helps you refine and sometimes even see new perspectives, and the other chaff and useless comments you can just ignore, doesn't really matter, as your experience shows as well. Ultimately I think you get back what you put into the HN-machine.

I do agree LLMs water down human writings to a extreme degree and people should just wholesale avoid them except for very surface-level copy-editing fixes, like spelling mistakes. Don't ask for their feedback how something feels or if it's "dumb" or whatever, use your own intuition.

[maplethorpe]

I get where you're coming from, and I agree to some extent, but I do think our tendency to weight criticism more favorably than praise (as if praise is "chaff" and criticism is automatically valuable) can be dangerous. This negativity bias unfortunately led me to adopt less-than-optimal ways of working in my younger years, because I assumed the people offering me criticism knew what they were talking about, when this wasn't always the case.

So while criticism can be valuable, I think it's worth reflecting an equally critical eye back at the person who is offering it, as upon closer inspection they may not be worth listening to at all.

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> because I assumed the people offering me criticism knew what they were talking about

I feel like this is the issue, and it's everywhere, not just HN. So 'fixing' HN wouldn't really solve the problem, each individual needs to learn what criticism they can listen to VS not. In the AFK world we have the benefit of knowing people, so you can implicitly trust some of them, but on the internet you need to first calibrate your "bullshit sensor" so you know what take aways you can actually take vs not.

> So while criticism can be valuable, I think it's worth reflecting an equally critical eye back at the person who is offering it, as upon closer inspection they may not be worth listening to at all.

Indeed, I agree :) As long as this happens based on what the person wrote rather than who the person is, you'll learn to eventually get really good at this, and all the mindless criticism becomes no-ops essentially :)