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by larrys 4132 days ago
"Imagine how terrible it must feel to have your work responded to with such a harshly critical eye - what you're doing is making the opinions of HN more generally negative and more easily ignored, just as directors now ignore the overly critical tome of movie critics."

What does "feeling" have to do with it?

I can't agree with that. Criticism is valuable. You can't learn anything from a pat on the back as you can from criticism. That's not saying that some of the things aren't deserved.

As an example I always get frustrated when the manager/owner of a restaurant walks around and says "is everything ok?" rather than "what can we do better or what wasn't perfect?" (in other words invite comments that may be negative).

Enough with the attaboys.

As far as HN what you typically can't learn from is downvotes without an explanation of why a downvote was received.

2 comments

I agree that criticism is valuable, it's just that when I joined HN there used to be incredibly useful feedback (designers would comment on design, UX people would give detailed walkthroughs of where they ran into bugs). It seems that since then, any Show HN that doesn't blow your mind to pieces goes straight to the wolves.

It's like being that restaurant owner and having people take one bite of their steak before complaining that it's not as good as the steak from the place down the street.

The post is an ad for their service and they kind of vaguely hate on Magic throughout. Not particularly valuable.