[ringmaster]

Useful, maybe. Constructive, no. Especially to someone who didn't understand enough not to do this in the first place.

Just because you should expect the internet to be full of douchebags does not mean you need to contribute to their number. It doesn't hurt to be nice.

[Karunamon]

I don't see anything particularly nasty about the comments called out by the author. One even seemed somewhat humorous in nature (first one).

Look.. if you are unable in this day and age, and this environment, to differentiate between honest criticism directed at your product, in this case "you wrecked my back history", "too much clicking", "too much animation" and insults directed at you (or your child.. what a shameful appeal to emotion), you are in the wrong line of work.

I honestly and truly mean that. If your criterion for "nasty" is a short message containing no insults, no foul language, simply a lack of social niceties book-ending the actual content, you're going to be very unpleasantly surprised when actual end users get ahold of your product and start voicing their annoyance with language that would make Linus Torvalds blush.

Being a labor of love certainly doesn't exempt you from criticism, even less so when you make a "Show HN" post about it!

If you don’t like my work because it is bad, tell me about it.

Here were three very concrete issues presented by random people. I don't know about you, but were I on the receiving end of those pretty reasonable comments, I'd have taken their advice to heart and made changes, not written what amounts to a tone argument in blog post form.

This post is made not in insult of the author or his work - it is made in honest critique of the blog post. Whatever tone is chosen to be read into this post is the reader's choice.

[DjangoReinhardt]

I am the author and I'd like to answer your comments, please:

I agree with you that the jump from the quoted comments to my passionate statement ("If you don't like my work...") was extremely abrupt. It seems to indicate that I believed the criticisms to be ad hominems directed at me.

Refuting the ad hominem ad-hoc, without an example was childish behavior on my part and I would like to apologise for that bit unreservedly. I also realise that it is VERY ironic considering the nature and topic of my post but I hope the rest of the post still makes good points.

Nope, I am not ashamed about the 'appeal to emotion' because it wasn't an appeal to emotion. It is something I personally believe and I'd like to stand by it, please. I think that anyone who's created something deserves a bit of admiration/praise along with the criticism and in that regard the example fits perfectly, IMHO. Let us agree to disagree here?

I beg to differ about the 'honesty of the criticism' and the 'concreteness' of the three issues you mention - IMHO, they were disguised as insults. The same points have also been brought up by others in the same thread in ways that are far better at promoting a conversation and a learning experience, in general.

It'll please you to know that the original creator of the Show HN (TuringMachine) was a far better man than I and I was thoroughly impressed by his responses. I, OTOH, was quick to express my anguish in a public forum and I have received some very interesting criticism myself. Yours is definitely one of them, thank you.

[ekidd]

I think that anyone who's created something deserves a bit of admiration/praise along with the criticism and in that regard the example fits perfectly, IMHO.

As a programmer, it's worth keeping in mind that your work—with any luck—will touch the lives of tens of thousands of people. If your work is poor, you will make those lives worse. If your work is excellent, you will make those lives better. Everything you do, for good or ill, may be multiplied by a huge number. This is how programmers can change the world, and how they can make piles of money.

But with this power comes a responsibility: We have to listen to those users, and we have to give them the best we can. If we're unlucky, the users will say nice things while suffering in silence. If we're lucky, some of those users will gripe and moan about something specific. Many programmers spend a huge amount of effort trying to get users to vent their frustrations in detail. One of the most brutally effective things a programmer can do is watch a user through one-way glass from a sound-proof room. You will sit there cursing yourself, mutter, "How could I have been so stupid? I have to fix that immediately."

Now, if a novice programmer shows me their Rails app in person, I'm going to compliment some stuff, rip some other stuff apart (with instructions on how to fix it), and point them towards useful tools. But if a programmer releases software to a wide audience, and that software sucks, I'll gripe as much as any other user. (Of course, if the software is open source, I know the answer will be "Patches, please!", so I skip the griping and send patches along with enthusiastic thank yous for the code.)

If you don't think your work is ready to touch the lives of ten thousand people, and you don't want that responsibility, then I actually recommend against doing a "Show HN". Find a smaller, more personal group, where people will interact with you, and not just your code.

And I say all of this as somebody who has zero patience for nasty personal remarks. The feedback you quoted was brutal, but as a working professional, I've invested both time and money to elicit similar feedback.

[DjangoReinhardt]

I wish I could meet more people like you and I wish that you meet better people than me. Thank you so much for taking the time to write this. You are truly awesome.

[Karunamon]

Hehe, I'll be the first person to agree that it would be better if HN had a few more "Go you!"s and a few less "This sucks!" - seems people are more likely to leave a comment in the second case but not on the first.

Then again, call me crazy, but I rather like the acerbic and terse nature of hackerdom. Phatic communication is jettisoned in favor of information density.. not something I'd want to live in as a society, but nice in this one slice of life. I can definitely see how that would bother some people and begin to eat at others, though.

Cheers, and thanks for being awesome :)

[peterwwillis]

  >  Constructive, no. Especially to someone who didn't understand enough not to do this in the first place

That's the whole point of the comment - to tell them not to do this! If we knew they did this on purpose just to piss us off, we wouldn't make the comment to begin with. We'd just put "Asshole."

In general it's not good or useful to present comments in a negative way, because negative comments cause a negative reaction from the intended recipient. But they're still getting the information that there was something specific they need to improve upon. So it's still constructive, it's just also rude.