I think these criticisms aren't just relevant to HN, they apply to all social media and online conversation. Even (group) email can become quite toxic if people don't convey their emotion well.
I have been on HN for 15 years, I have spent far too much time on this site. Eventually you learn which topics will be "toxic" and avoid them (if you want to). To some extent it just maturity (or lack there of) but I actually think HN is far less toxic outside of some specific topics than other sites.
The topics that are liable to become flame wars change over time, currently it seems to be anything "Crypto" or "Online Advertising" as people have very strong feelings on both sides. I'm certainly still guilty of getting drawn in at times, especially when I feel I have a horse in the race. There is always insightful comments in these threads too.
Fortunately HN is designed to detect topics that are getting out of hand (far more comments than up votes) and they drop of the homepage quickly massively reducing the exposure. Exactly where this thread is already going.
I think the best decision HN made was not breaking the site into categories or "Sub-HNs" where specific toxic topics can grow and mutate, everything is forced though the front page ensuring a level of self moderation.
After 15 years on the site I have no intention of leaving it.
I'm a very sparing user of social media, but after work I do love to play games. I play games with people I know IRL as well as a litany of people I've never met - true to my old 90's and 00's gamer days. Now, there's Discord.
I was pretty skeptical the first time people implored me to join a Discord server, but I've found some communities are very dope. I've discovered that managing peoples behavior online is like trying to herd sheep in a straight line. The flock always goes forward, that much is constant. There are sheep on the left and on the right side of the herd that push the herd onto a new trajectory, a lot of the time I don't think they even know what they're doing, but if you take a step back you can watch it occur in real-time. A leader, who likely doesn't know they're a leader, starts acting in a certain way, which causes the shift. Then another leader clashes with that leader by proxy, which is what I describe as the other side of the herd. These bounding behaviors almost never keep the flock constrained, they cause the flock to split.
These leaders are disposable though. They're placeholders for culture, language, collections of experience, values, etc that people identify with. It takes having conversations with troublemakers and making their effects known in plain language. Some people will get it, moderate their behavior despite their culture, language, collections of experience, values etc and some won't. Those who won't will either leave on their own or get banned.
Health, specifically diet/exercise, are also on this list of topics that typically get pretty toxic in my mind. Where the volume of voice outweigh the experts in the crowd.
> I think these criticisms aren't just relevant to HN, they apply to all social media and online conversation.
I believe the reason is that epistemology (generally: theory of knowledge, seeking/determining what is actually(!) True) is not just hard, but it goes counter to the natural workings of the human mind. If the topic of a thread is a psychology paper dealing with human perception, bias, this sort of thing (an abstract discussion of the phenomenon), few people have difficulty realizing and acknowledging that this is a fundamental problem, in/with reality. However, if the topic of discussion is an object level matter, particularly culture war issues (but even technical ones, as the author notes), the mind seems to run in a different mode - gone[1] is the knowledge that the mind is subject to imperfect thinking, replaced by ~"perception is reality". And, one's intuition might suggest that intelligent people would be less prone to this problem, but substantial evidence[2] suggests that this is not only not necessarily true, but that intelligence exacerbates the problem (if one is usually more often correct than others, it is perfectly reasonable that their default confidence level in being correct would increase).
What I think is also interesting: it seems to me that this one fundamental idea could be one of the main root cause problems with human interaction on the internet (or, in general, really), a topic most people seem to be very interested in - but oddly, these same people almost without exception (in my experience) have zero (or less than) interest in identifying plausible root causes of the problem and contemplating/brainstorming solutions - the exact opposite of what one's intuition might predict. I have yet to encounter a single human being that is even marginally seriously interested in this idea (and many(!) who recoil from it), and I have talked to hundreds of people about it, often in meetups and other places where the general problem with people getting along, fake news, etc is literally the sole topic of conversation.
I am not optimistic that humanity can solve a problem that their mind does not grant them access to (assuming my theory has some truth to it).
There are four ways in which people disagree. First is just miscommunication which is easily clarified. Second is working from a different set of facts. Third is same facts, different interpretation. Lastly is same facts, same interpretation, different principles. Discourse online straddles the four, with an unhealthy amount of ego and stubborness thrown in for good (bad) measure. Without a good way to get people on the same page first, aka people don't even read the linked article before commenting (tbc, guilty of that myself), there's zero real hope of getting people interested in epistemology and why we get it so wrong. And who could blame them? Examining why you believe something central to your identity threatens it and is very uncomfortable, and most people simply aren't here for that.
You've listed a perfectly reasonable high level summary of some of the problems....but is this summary actually true, comprehensively? For example: "There are four cities in China" is also a true statement.
There's one fundamental thing most everyone overlooks when engaging in examination of reality: you're not actually dealing with reality, but rather a sophisticated and invisible model of it - and it is because of this (fundamentally, with massive amounts of additional nuanced details) that I believe at least some decent background in the fundamentals of epistemology (plus: logic, linguistics, semantics, psychology, meditation/mindfulness, etc) are required for humanity to get a handle on this out of control bus we're all riding in.
And the scariest part to me: not only is there no serious initiative underway or under discussion approaching the problem from this perspective (unless I've somehow not encountered it in my searching), rare is the individual who is not opposed to the validity of the notion. As crazy as it sounds, I truly believe there is something hard wired in the human mind cutting off our access to such ideas - it seems not possible for people to even consider it.
This is the tamest and most well moderated forum I've experienced on the internet. For goodness sakes, I made a snarky comment about an NFT marketplace and was firmly warned about it by dang.
I'd say tildes.net, most project-specific forums (Discourse instances for FLOSS projects come to mind: Fedora, Let's Encrypt, F-Droid, Signal, and others), several mailing lists, and perhaps even lobste.rs are far more constructive.
I've noticed that HN is just like Reddit, Lemmy, and other up/down-vote based forums for threaded discussions in that it incentivizes one extremely predictable pattern:
Commenters have a first impression of what an article will say before they finish reading it, or before they read it at all. They take this anticipation of what the article will say, form an opinion about it, and search for comments that validate that opinion. These comments get upvoted.
Because of this, commenters have an incentive to not just validate common opinions about an article, but opinions about what an article may be about so they don't have to risk considering its content/views.
This phenomenon applies to the comments too, to a lesser degree. There's a recursive effect going on that promotes bikeshedding.
While it shares this characteristic, at leas the discussion quality is better than mainstream social media (FB, Reddit, etc); however, that's not even worth mentioning IMO because comparing a forum's quality to them would be an insult to said forum.
Several far less active forums like littr, subreply, gurlic, and tilde.news are far less toxic so some of this is probably most apparent with some popularity.
I will say that the moderation seems excellent, though.
I've been on lobste.rs for a long time and I'm not a fan. Lobste.rs has IMO been progressively getting worse in a way that HN has not (which has, IMO, mostly stayed the same over my tenure here which is long, even longer than the time I've been on Lobsters.) tildes.net I have mixed feelings on but am much more hopeful about its outlook. They both have the same failure mode:
1. Both sites have closed membership with invites given to users. In practice this means that some users invite people but mostly a minority of users with very strong interests/beliefs end up inviting others who share the same strong interests/beliefs in order to shift the narrative. On Lobsters these are PLT enthusiasts and FOSS systems programmers, on Tildes these are leftists. All of this:
2. Makes any conversation about topics that the in-crowd is a domain expert in (on Lobsters: PLT, FOSS systems programming) good, but makes any conversation about other topics anywhere from clueless (networking) to just bad (scientific computing, machine learning). HN's breadth makes it a fantastic resource in a lot of more esoteric topics. Networking threads will have folks chiming in who authored core RFCs or who help run large ISPs. DB threads will have DB authors talking about block algorithms. Sure, political threads often draw some pretty bad quality discussion, but the top posts on most technical topics are often posted by insiders with lots of first-hand knowledge (though the moment you get more than a few posts down, that changes.)
3. Creates identity-based politics around the in-crowd. Anti-FOSS viewpoints on Lobsters are heavily criticized. Liking Go used to get you piled-on, though these days it happens a lot less frequently. Oppose software minimalism takes and get lots of pushback. Rules are fine to break if the in-crowd agrees with you but are much more brittle if the in-crowd disagrees with you. You have to have a thick skin if you want to oppose the in-crowd on Lobsters. The site is mostly driven by the whims of its posters and pushcx, which the rules are a thin veneer atop of. There's a lot of snide commentary and petty negativity on Lobsters and a lot of it is based around insulting members of other communities (insulting folks on HN is pretty much a pasttime for Lobsters.)
The big differences with Tildes and Lobsters are that Tildes is a general discussion forum and Lobsters is not. Correspondingly, Tildes's mod Deimos has a fairly light touch moderating the website, which makes me much more hopeful about its ability to build a healthy community. Lobsters' current head admin pushcx is IMO an extremely overbearing mod who bans first and asks questions later. Sometimes I think a topic's survival on that site is based purely on his mood. If pushcx doesn't like something you're posting there's a high chance it's going to get deleted.
While Lobste.rs certainly started out having a more technical focus, over time it has essentially become a longform discussion platform for folks in FOSS Mastodon circles. If something is popular in those circles it'll get upvoted and discussed on Lobste.rs, if it's unpopular it'll get booed. On HN you can discuss a much larger variety of technical topics and get reasonable answers from insiders. Just avoid the political threads and the flamewar-du-jour threads (crypto and ads right now, who knows what it'll be tomorrow) and you'll be fine.
I've read the lobste.rs moderation log for a while and i think its a bad platform. pushcx bans first and considers second, there were several times users complained about it in the irc channel.
I remember the time when the poster of the (at that moment) no. 1 post got banned for self-promotion, because it was a link to their own blog.
The dataswamp domain ban also was a disgrace that looked like pushcx had no skin and a bad day.
Oh, I thought it was just me - I was looking at the moderation log and thought to myself "is it just me, or is pushcx being awfully aggressive with the banhammer? nah, I probably just aren't seeing the really awful posts..."
Although, you have to give him credit for a few well-justified bans from figures sometimes seen here on HN...
He gave a few examples, but to be honest HN filters for quantity over quality with topic discussion.
It cargo cults academia but isn't actually very academic or novel.
Spread out your thoughts in a PG style manner and make sure it's emotionally sparse and you're good. You can literally say nearly anything here, even to the point of it being disingenuous or hateful and it will stand.
It's hard to be very academic when discussions are as massive and short-lived as on HN. I think of Lobsters as a lot more academic than HN, and the fact that so very few people have posting privileges there is clearly a part of that.
<thinks of Twitter's "would you like to read this first?" nag>
Knowing it is likely non-viable, in the same way "pass this quiz to demonstrate familiarity with the issues on which you are about to vote" is non-viable,
I wonder if there are forums which have formalized (rather than consensual implicit) proof-of-read friction in front of contribution to a discussion...
Why am I suddenly envisioning a humanities/chattering-class distributed proof-of-comprehension blockchain, in which miners compete to consume and compelling demonstrate relatively dispassionate comprehension of successive argumentation in a domain not readily reducible to "data."
Mostly kidding unless you are interested in being seed round DMs open
If you could write up a "whitepaper" a couple of pages long and it was semi-coherent, I'm sure you could get some web3 vc to bite. Or form a DAO around it.
Might never actually be a viable concept, but that needn't stop you in this environment!
I think such an idea is viable....my main issue (as someone who can't program himself out of a paper bag) is getting not just funding, but non-silicon-valley funding, from someone I can also trust.
User comment voting has many more downsides than upsides. Pretty much every forum should have abandoned it years ago, but apparently it's never going away.
It really depends. If you say a facebook employee should quit because their company is toxic, you'll have dang on you in no time. Talk about killing homeless people as a solution to homelessness in SF? No problem.
The moderation here is setup to avoid personal attacks, snark, and to stop people from shitting on YC companies, but for the most part, a lot of the most toxic parts of the internet are just as bad here (or worse) than other parts of the internet.
> Talk about killing homeless people as a solution to homelessness in SF? No problem.
That's of course not true at all. If you're talking about a specific post, can we please see the link?
Btw, moderation here is not set up to "stop people from shitting on YC companies", but exactly the opposite. That is literally the first rule of HN moderation: we moderate less, not more, when YC or a YC co is the story. It was the first thing PG explained to me when he was teaching me how to moderate (he was blurting it at me before I'd even had a chance to grab a chair), and it's the first thing I've taught to others.
Literal example. They weren't saying "we should kill homeless people", but more along the lines of "the most effective way of dealing with the homeless, of course, would be to kill them, but that's not politically acceptable..."
At the time I had seen it, which was hours after the topic was posted, it wasn't voted down.
> Literal example. They weren't saying "we should kill homeless people", but (...)
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and given that it only took a reply to water down the initial bombastic claim, unless you support your claims with concrete proof I'll have to write off your claim as hyperbolic misrepresentations.
It's not watered down. It's a person nonchalantly talking about killing homeless people as a viable solution to homelessness. The way you've edited my reply completely misrepresents what I said, to make it look like I've somehow changed the meaning. I followed up to give more specific language, not to change the meaning.
This kind of comment isn't out of the ordinary on this site, so I'm not going to spend a few hours tracking down the specific post to prove it. Just wait for a similar topic, and you'll see similar posts.
> It's a person nonchalantly talking about killing homeless people as a viable solution to homelessness.
Do you have a link or not? You're running in circles about he-said-she-said, but the only concrete info you shown so far boils down to your own personal extraordinary words you're trying to pin on some random person.
I mean, how can anyone tell whether you're making everything up or not?
I'd guess such a comment to be made satirically (in the vein of 'a modest proposal'), especially given the context you added, but I could see why this would be disturbing.
Yes, if you want to say something reprehensible it’s fine as long as you say it in a long-winded and impartial-sounding fashion involving lots of “logic” and “objectivity” à la Slate Star Codex.
It's the most well moderated free forum. I'm a member of some paid forums that is far better, but that makes sense because people don't like toxicity in something they have paid for.
SA used to be in a troll war with the old Slashdot.org tech forum. 4chan was a later 'spinoff' built by a Something Awful user, and taking much of its initial community from there. Given these facts I've never thought of Something Awful as especially free from toxicity.
Metafilter has remarkably high-quality discussion given its size.
I've been a member of various private email lists over the years which can be good, though those seem to have an active lifespan of 5--10 years, with 10 being a pretty extreme outlier.
Those communities become quite insular over time, and tend to retain less-interesting and spin out more interesting contributors.
> What specifically are you pointing out as the toxic behaviour?
I am not the the grandparent, but with your permission, may I ask you …
Do you agree that “pie-hole” is deprecatory?
Do you agree that the question “who cares what X says?” is likely dismissive rhetoric, rather than a genuine expression of interest in who the people are who pay attention to X?
> Do you agree that the question “who cares what X says?”
Perhaps I've become desensitized, but "toxic" is not a synonym for "not supportive". Being dismissive of something or someone, or not agreeing with someone for that matter, does not mean a community or person is toxic. It just means you don't agree or support someone or something, and instead you have different opinions and support different positions.
On a similar post here I was given a lot of flak for posting anti-Nazi sentiments, I didn't realize that it was such a charged topic considering how it's Canadian truckers boycotting mask mandates as the mask mandates are ending and how neo-nazis are showing up in support for the whole thing.
I mean, generally, if I am at a large gathering and Nazis show up and they're on my side I would hope I would have a nice long think about what I was doing at that moment but some of these people are failing to realize that the sentiment of "they're on MY side, so it's okay now" increases the likelihood of people ending up on their side as well in the future.
What exactly prevents whoever filmed this of simply not posting any clip that's offensive? Because I've seen many videos and photos of hate symbols, and there are quite a few examples of assault and harassment
No, he means the raw unedited videos, like the ones on channel he linked. The extensively edited and cherry-picked videos are the ones shown by corporate media and partisans.
> No, he means the raw unedited videos, like the ones on channel he linked.
Is it though? Things don't magically disappear from raw footage. Either you edit it out or not show inconvenient footage.
I mean, all this gaslighting requires you in the very least to accuse other footage from the same events and involving the same people of being fabricated.
I think I tried reading Metafilter once; it was a thread discussing whether men rape for power or for pleasure, and anytime a man tried posting in the thread they were driven off for not "centering women".
Although that style of discourse was pretty common at the time, quite popular on livejournal and later tumblr.
Lately I see complaints about it being full of people who tell you to go to therapy as a solution for everything. Which I didn't even know was a type.
It’s the most well moderated free forum that has a broad scope of topics. Many of the major domain-focused forums (for cars, modeling, collecting) are well managed by moderators and a community who like to see dense value for the topic at hand, low tolerance for unrelated conversation, and see their hobby as a refuge from the noise everywhere else in life. On HN, even though nominally focused, any and all topics make it on here.
As is so often the case on Internet forums, I’ve erred and let myself get heated here from time to time. Of the thankfully rare interactions I’ve had with the moderation team, it’s always been a positive experience. I never felt like they were trying to punish, but rather to cultivate an intellectually rich forum where they want me to participate fruitfully.
It’s a pretty thankless job, so I’ll take this opportunity to say thanks mod team, in particular thanks dang!
I was gonna say exactly this… It's absolutely true. Compared against almost every other comments/discussion forum I've tried/used, this is by far one of the overall generally sanest (free and open-ish) places on the modern web to participate in discussions.
It's also one of the most dog-whistled racist communities I've been on. Unfortunately, calling out that behavior gets you targeted as a SJW, or something else.
But yeah, on some posts, I get really uncomfortable on HN.
I agree with your point of view even if I wouldn’t have phrased it like that.
I’ve read / posted / shitposted stuff on here that would get me ratiod or yalled on other social networks, and would definitely lose me friends if I publicly repeated it, or family if I pushed it politically.
I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head because I read hundreds of stories per week on here and only notice it when I see a (not downvoted) comment that makes me go WOOOOOOW.
> The topics that are liable to become flame wars change over time, currently it seems to be anything "Crypto" or "Online Advertising" as people have very strong feelings on both sides
Oh yes, I've kept a very high opinion of this forum and its commenters once I skipped right past the daily 250+ comment posts about COVID-19 that have plagued us for 2 years. When it comes to tech, this place is an absolute treasure, but there's few things as odious as tech nerds improvising themselves as politicians, epidemiologists, microbiologists, logistics experts and activists just because they know how to use Google and follow some people on Twitter.
The bitcoin craze wasn't even close to being as bad as the past two years.
odious as tech nerds improvising themselves as politicians, epidemiologists, microbiologists, logistics experts and activists just because they know how to use Google and follow some people on Twitter.
What is wrong with people do their own research, seeking their own info? Health experts, the mainstream media, and politicians do not have a monopoly on truth, and were wrong any times about Covid.
Generally because 99% of people are not researchers and when they say "doing their own research" they mean reading a few blogs and facebook posts. Reading actual papers done by researchers is a step above that, of which a few people will skim maybe one paper.
What makes you think that? How do you know they are reading Facebook and not reading the papers? From what I've seen on HN, people commenting contrarian studies have actually read them.
I read through a lot of those threads, there wasn't much of value there, just angry people shouting at each other mostly. I'm not saying it should be banned, but I too stopped reading them eventually because what's the point?
"My dad told me that he wants to dabble in programming, but MySQL isn’t compatible with his laptop. My response? "Yeah there’s no way that’s true. MySQL will work on anything." Instead of taking a look at this laptop and working on the problem with him, I just told him that he's wrong and he doesn't know what he's doing (basically)."
I catch myself doing this, without realizing it far too often. It's good to catch yourself and try to change.
It's the type of response a younger me would have said before I found out how wrong I can be even on subjects I think I know a lot about. My response now to such a question would be "That's weird, mySQL should work on all laptops. Let me take a look." From that point on I'm expecting it to be an error the person didn't understand, but I'm open to the idea that it might be a failure of their install script due to an odd configuration of the laptop, or even a symptom of another problem somewhere else, such as limited disk space, incorrectly installed drivers, or even a hardware issue.
There's a far more charitable interpretation (and explanation) of this: broadness.
People who know too little don't know how to get to the happy path, let alone stay in there.
People who know too much know extensively where the happy path lies, it's neighborhood, how to go off-road out of the happy path and the dangers that lie therein.
People in the middle know how to get to the happy path and remain there, and know that steering away from the happy path leads to trouble and ambiguity. As they mastered the happy path then they feel unlimited confidence and arrogance.
It's entirely possible that it's correct depending on the specifics.
Say for example one is trying to install MySQL 8.0 on a laptop with Catalina, which is still supported by Apple and getting security updates. This is actually unsupported and won't work. A somewhat unlikely situation but definitely not impossible.
Exactly what the crafty older person wanted. Get you to do the work. "It doesn't work on my computer" or some other claim of trouble or ignorance is an easy way to trick a smart energetic young person to do something for you.
Young smart people don't like to say "I don't know how" or "I can't get it to work." An older person will say that without hesitation if it will prompt someone else to do something that he doesn't want to do himself.
This is an uncharitably suspicious inferring of the other person's motives. Is it required that the "older person" self-identify their technical limitations every time, before you will read their verbalization of the situation as a basic statement of frustration and/or admission of technical defeat?
For many people, the notion of debugging a MySQL installation on Windows so that it works seems about as plausible as summitting K2 - they don't expect others nearby can simply do it, either. (Also, the suggestion of inter-generational manipulation is not attractive.)
> This is an uncharitably suspicious inferring of the other person's motives.
Agreed.
The charitable interpretation is a lot more reasonable: a parent/elder wants to spend time with their child/younger, and is even taking an interest in their career/hobbies.
I don’t think it’s uncharitable. It just recognizes that there are always energetic problem solvers out there who will jump at the chance to prove someone wrong.
It’s kind of like the well known technique: “If you want the right answer to your question, confidently post the wrong answer and wait for the replies.”
I'd say the implied request for help or at least ideas for troubleshooting or alternatives is so obvious and natural that it doesn't merit this level of suspicion about ulterior motives. It's completely normal to say "I can't reach the top shelf" and mean "can you help me get something off the top shelf?"
As an aside, commonplace implicatures like these are a kind of what's called "pragmatics" in linguistics.
My help comes at a price; they are going to sit there with me and listen to me blather on about what I'm looking at and what I find and what the solution was :)
The problem in those examples is not rejecting the premise, it's doing so in a dismissive, arrogant way.
I've had customers, friends, and family members tell me time and time again that they can't do some common, everyday thing on their computers because it's "not compatible", or it "won't let them", or it "doesn't work". If they're wrong, I show them where they're wrong, what they need to do to fix the problem and avoid similar ones in the future. No need to be dismissive, or berate them for not knowing something. It ends up being a nice "today I learned" situation for them, and we all win.
Honestly, the world would be a much more amazing place if it would be taught in schools that just "it doesn't work" does not convey any meaningful information. I don't mean this as complaint, just saying that it's so extremely common and so simple it can be a part of curriculum or a social campaign that has potential to save a lot of human-hours (and lots of frustration) just by spreading a simple meme/idea.
Also, I can't say I perceive the dismissal from the quote alone. Those two short sentences feel like a very brief excerpt from beginning of a conversation so it's hard to gauge, but I feel that it's an exclamation of surprise that's non-committal and lacking an explicit offer to proceed with details, rather than dismissive (or worse). Circumstances, tone, body language, relationship and other things may make it vary, of course. Can't say it's arrogant either, "no way, it must work" is a legit exclamation that doesn't imply incompetence (unless, again, tone etc).
I'd say it's just passive, not taking any initiative to troubleshoot and communicating just the assurance that the problem must be solvable, then bouncing back to the inquirer. In my understanding, it's more of a lazy/not being in the mood, not dismissive (and I'd have a really hard time trying to call it "toxic").
> Honestly, the world would be a much more amazing place if it would be taught in schools that just "it doesn't work" does not convey any meaningful information.
Couldn't agree more. My first step when troubleshooting anything for someone else is to extract as much information as possible to understand what I'm dealing with. Having that information from the start would save me a lot of time.
>I can't say I perceive the dismissal from the quote alone.
True, the quote alone is not necessarily dismissive or arrogant, and your interpretation could very well be correct. I'm assuming it was dismissive because the author seems troubled by his own response, which he interprets as "I just told him that he's wrong and he doesn't know what he's doing". That's where my interpretation comes from.
A bit off-topic but I've actually got an inverse problem... Before contacting support I'm trying to collect as much diagnostics as possible, so my first message tends to be a long detailed list of what's the problem, what I did, and what possibly useful (to best of my awareness) supplementary diagnostics I've already performed. This frequently confuses first-tier support folks who're used to people reaching out with mere "nothing works pls help!!1one" and going through checklists.
I try to avoid doing that now. It's like going to the doctor and spending 1/2 hour explaining anything that could possibly be related to the issue for which you came. I've found that it is much more helpful to give a concise summary, and be ready to answer very specific questions as they go through their logical process to figure out what actually is the problem. In some cases they need clues but don't know which ones, and then you need to tell everything (e.g. rare diseases, or bugs that happen once in a blue moon at 10:53 when the wind comes from the North). But then, they ask for it explicitly.
I've also had humbling experiences, particularly one with me going through what I thought was relevant and a very nice tech support lady telling me the equivalent of "but did you make sure you turned it on?", and she was right.
Overloading tier-1 techs with too much information rarely does any good, from my experience.
Yup, I do the same thing. I guess I'm lucky because I rarely have issues with my own gear and the services I use, so contacting support is not something I've needed to do frequently. But when I do, I spend a good amount of time doing research and making sure the issue actually merits bothering someone else and isn't something I can eventually fix on my own. Tier-1 support people are invariably caught by surprise :p
> Honestly, the world would be a much more amazing place if it would be taught in schools that just "it doesn't work" does not convey any meaningful information.
One problem is that most people are socialized heavily against going into these kinds of details in almost every situation they will experience. Only engineers are frequently around other people who want to know specifically what "it doesn't work" means. And even in those cases, you've got to tailor your level of detail with care. It's no wonder people learned to just say "it doesn't work", in the same way that they learned to reply to "how are you" with something vague rather than something extremely specific.
I enjoy teaching people new things in general, but what I win specifically depends on the situation. With friends and family, it's the personal satisfaction of helping someone I care about.
With customers there's the added benefit of improving business relationships and building trust. If someone contacts me with a question, and I withhold the answer until they pay me, they're gonna feel cheated when they realise the answer was pretty straightforward. It doesn't matter if, technically, I'm providing a service and I'm within my rights to ask for compensation. That customer is going to hesitate to return in the future, because they now feel I just care about their money.
Being open, transparent, and helpful has the opposite effect, in my experience. The customer feels at ease with me, they trust my judgment, know that I'm looking out for them, and so are happy to return to me when they need something, and pay for the job.
Case 1: the person learned and became more autonomous. Fewer questions like this will be asked in the future. You have developed good will.
Case 2: the person expects someone else to do their work. That won't fly for long with me. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and I will react. Friends and family members can land on the no-contact list. Employees can get fired.
Assume the best, but always prepare for the worst.
Or they're like my father and can't remember things long term anymore because he's too old. I have to walk him through how to join a Discord server every single time I want to use it with him. He used to be good at this stuff, but I guess IQ studies are right that crystallized intelligence (which includes long term memory) goes down after 60.
Never helping anyone with technical stuff unless you're getting paid (or whatever similar thing you can think of) is over-correcting for the doormats that can't say no
I stopped helping people, in general, when there were several instances of people telling me that whatever I did the last time I touched their computer caused some random problem 6 month later. That, and it seemed that people were getting upset when I would show them how to do things, within a couple of minutes (from just knowing where to navigate), that they had been struggling with for hours, or that they were, in fact, typing their password wrong. Maybe they weren't upset with me, but it was usually a negative experience for me, and it slowly chipped away at the glee I used to have for helping people.
One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was to maintain the capacity to be surprised. And they didn't mean maintaining the capacity to be surprised by someone exceeding expectations, but rather being surprised that the facts are not at all what I currently think they are.
I've noticed myself doing this in the last year or so. I've done it all my life, I'm sure, but it's the first time I really recognized the behavior. I wish I had caught it sooner because it definitely comes across as rude and a bit condescending.
I think for so many of us, we desire to be correct, or to correct people or the world, so much that we miss out on the true "signal" someone is sending us with their message. In this case, the author's dad wanting help in getting into programming.
I don't know if it's 100% true, but for me it feels like correcting people is partly wanting validation that I'm smart or know things. It's sort of performative, and can be very selfish.
This is typical programmer behavior. We end up in tech because we have more interest in thing than people. Empathy is not as developed as technical aptitude. I don't think it's a result of an online forum. Perhaps gathering with like minded people doesn't help but the problem goes deeper. Ultimately this sort of issue is about personal development. I say this as someone with plenty to work on myself.
Use whatever strategies you think will result in the personal growth you desire. One strategy might be to avoid HN. However HN is not the problem you are. Taking responsibility will help you grow. You're influenced by your environment but you're responsible for how you respond to your environment. You always have a choice.
I don't even understand the premise. My answer would be "There's no chance it's not compatible with your laptop. Tell me what happened."
If I wasn't ready to argue, I wouldn't have said anything. Arguing in this case means to troubleshoot with him. Sometimes I think that other people think the purpose of argument is to hurt people. The purpose of argument (for me) is to make the people who are arguing smarter than they were before the argument. I don't get pleasure out of hurting my father or showing him up - I like my father. If anything, I want to make him feel smarter than he is, and I hope he feels the same about me.
edit: Also, it may turn out this is a weird corner-case and MySQL is somehow incompatible with his laptop. I'm not a MySQL scientist. After finding that out, though, I'm a tiny bit closer to being one.
I think this is the sentiment that they are fighting back on and calling toxic. I tend to agree. I don't want to argue and don't think it is a very good path to learning or improvement. A better alternative IMHO is conversation or joint exploration.
I think the biggest challenge is the format of internet dialog is conducive to argument that it leads people to forget or skip other modes of conversation.
If I asked for help with a problem and someone tried to argue with me, I would think they are toxic and look for help elsewhere. I didn't ask for help because I was looking for a fight.
The Socratic method and debate is good if you want to find the errors in your thinking. But I'm not trying to philosophically debug my thought processes and world view. I just want to fix a damn program.
This. I don't get it either. In my view, the "no way, it must work" is a non-optimal but perfectly valid conversation starter (please explain me why not if I'm wrong). As long as that's not the whole conversation (which would mean there are way worse problems than lack of explicit inquiry in that response) and there's at some sort of follow-up from either party, I don't really see the problem here.
(Disclaimer: I'm explicitly not thinking up circumstances, tone, gestures or anything else not included in that short snippet. Obviously. It's well possible same exact words spoken in different contexts or with different tone or body language may have quite opposite meanings.)
Yes, there are better responses. But it's definitely not a "well, that sucks and you're wrong, go try some more" either.
I think the issue is how people approach the purpose of conversation.
Many internet forum conversations take the form of arguing or debate. That is to say, the goal is getting to the bottom of a dispute showing someone that they are wrong (or learning that you are).
People who do this often fall into the habit of defaulting to this mindset and goal in conversations where this is not the purpose.
"no way, it must work" is a non-optimal but perfectly valid conversation starter. The problem is when there isnt follow up on the real point of the conversation (helping dad), because they treated the interaction as an argument to be won.
>My dad told me that he wants to dabble in programming, but MySQL isn’t compatible with his laptop. My response? "Yeah there’s no way that’s true. MySQL will work on anything." Instead of taking a look at this laptop and working on the problem with him, I just told him that he's wrong and he doesn't know what he's doing (basically).
The other example is even more telling:
>my ex-girlfriend once told me that hospitals can’t require their staff to wear N95 masks at all times -- only regular masks. I immediately said "I don’t believe that. They can probably do whatever they want." Instead of being empathetic toward a nurse after a 12-hour shift, I was more concerned over hospital policy.
The ex-girlfirend isnt looking for a spirited argument or debate after a long day. They dont care about who is right or wrong, or getting to the factual bottom of things. The author is dragging this mindset into a conversation where it is unwanted and doesn't belong.
> I don't get pleasure out of hurting my father or showing him up - I like my father.
Sure but there's way to say something that may hurt someone... even if you don't intend to.
I think it's something that happens more on the web as we forget there's someone on the other side.
> Also, it may turn out this is a weird corner-case and MySQL is somehow incompatible with his laptop.
You started with "There's no chance" though... You may be ready to change your stance, but your first sentence didn't have that possibility. What someone understands by your sentence is that "I am the problem" instead of "there may be a problem".
I don't think OP example was the best to illustrate the issue, but I don't have a better example either, still struggling with that myself too.
I recognize myself in this story, but I wouldn't say that I mean to be mean or dismissive or superior. Usually it's that I fall into the trap of being 'too literal'. We spend all day being very precise about the conditions and cases where we are making changes, amendments, or extending capabilities. It drives me crazy when people won't just get to the point of the story or ask that can be scoped-out if-and-as necessary. I'm not talking about interacting with inexperienced people either, they're otherwise very intelligent and articulate but have a way of speaking that seems all so inefficient or ineffective, often adding lots of emotional embellishments that don't change the problem statement.
Now, I'm not usually as unaware of insensitive as that description may sound, but you may be able to see some truth in the patterns.
[I kind-of feel like I'm on a rant, so I'll add this too. The worst is when engineers at a meeting debate the 'root cause' theorizing all the permutations and possibilities to identify the correct one, taking as long as that takes. Often a simple search through the source-code or log files would have narrowed it down to but a few to easily verify--but they'd rather be playing RCA golf out loud.]
That's a really unhelpful response, because it just seeks to deny what that user has just experienced! A better approach is to say that MySQL just being incompatible with stuff is not something that's supposed to happen, but as part of asking for clarification on how the supposed incompatibility came about (or even simply as offering to look into it, if appropriate), so as to helpfully root-cause and troubleshoot the issue. The basic facts you're relying on are exactly the same, but the underlying attitude could not be more different!
I struggle with understanding this viewpoint. I don't think the son is being harsh or dismissive, in fact it strikes me as utterly guileless. He has a reaction . o O (That can't be right...) and voices it without artifice or manipulation.
On the other hand, the father presumably knows that the son is technically inclined, but dismisses his expertise out of hand. He's struggling, but he doesn't say "I'm struggling getting this to work." The author presumes that the father wants him to help, and I defer to him on that, but the father doesn't ask for help. Instead he stakes out an extreme position (it's incompatible!). In some cases, people do this in an intentionally manipulative way! (See comment in this thread about the timeless technique of confidently stating a wrong answer to goad people into jumping in.)
I don't know the author or his father, so I don't know what their actual intentions or interactions are. Please don't read my comment as impugning them or their motives in any way. But the hypothetical situation as presented does not lead me to the conclusions that I think the author intends readers to reach.
You know, I think that is not toxic, and I would argue it is not smart or dumb ( so to speak ) as the author tries to put it.
It is simply youth and inexperience, or age and wisdom depending on the situation and how you view it.
And that is a problem in online discussion because I dont know people's age. ( And that is going to get drawn into ageism discussions but let's ignore that for now ) If I know you are only 20ish. My first instinct wouldn't be try and correct you it "really" isn't working. It is to convince you to take a look. And give you directions. You cant give people answer to questions or problems they have. They have to figure it out the answer themselves. The experience of real learning.
And online discussions misses a lot of these context. Or at least very hard to do it correctly.
You should, in most cases grown out of it in your 30s, or about 10 years after you start working in the society. And laugh about the stupidity of it in your 40s or 50s.
My biggest concern is somehow there are increasingly number of people, especially in tech ( I have no idea why ) that dont grown out of it.
“Congrats, your first lesson in programming is troubleshooting a MySQL installation”. I would help him logically troubleshoot, and understand how to enjoy* the problem rather than be frustrated by it, but no way would I do it for him. He’ll have many harder problems soon enough. Make it a teachable moment.
* I’m not saying it will always be enjoyable - nothing sucks more than things that should work but don’t when you’re on a schedule, but if it’s your first foray into taking technical “ownership” of your system, ya better learn to be interested in the new problems, understanding the clockworks, and learning to think as the machine does.
Sometimes I wish I were a little more like that. Instead I agonize over wording so I don't sound impolite / stupid and often choose to say nothing, even where my input might be useful. I guess there are worse things.
If people want to collaborate, sure. I play 3 instruments, have stripped multiple cars to the frame, and rebuilt them, grown food, cooked everything. Lets collaborate on something worth connecting over.
Please don’t make me collaborate over copy-pasting a bash script or a one line Docker command.
I find those issues have nothing to do with the complexity of figuring it out but belief in division of labor. A sad, functionally fixed idea of what a person can do.
> "These are typical, HN-esque responses that may get upvotes online, but they hurt personal relationships."
As a regular, I disagree completely. Comments that point out that something is wrong and have the empathy to try to help and identify a solution are much more upvoted that cynical ones that just point out that something is wrong without much caring for the other part.
If you dig up HN only paying attention to potentially toxic comments, you will find them. It doesn't make HN toxic. If you create the habit of reading yesterday's posts, giving them enough time for the best comments to be upvoted and settle at the top, you will see much much less toxicity.
It seems to me that the author is trying to get away from a certain behavior and, in the process, everywhere they look they just fit what they see in that exact behavior. Like when Woody Woodpecker is hungry.
> If anything, the GP feels unpleasant for trying to present its parent comment in the worst possible light, in an overly snarky tone.
Pointing factually and patently wrong assertions is not a personal attack nor being toxic.
A comment or article does not have first-move advantage for making false claims free from negative opinions or corrections. If you make a blatantly false claim and you're called on it then that's the Hallmark of a healthy community having healthy discussions.
Well first, you took a well-meaning article discussing how HN can be toxic. Kind of a non-debatable thing, and you debated it. You started with "disagree completely" and I know you are COMPLETELY aware that emphasizing the completeness of your disagreement is argumentative.
While I don't think your comment is TOXIC I do think it suffers from the unkind, know-it-all argumentative mentality that HN has. So as a whole, it does contribute to the toxic nature of HN.
You are basically accusing the author of "only reading the toxic parts" without you knowing whether or not they did that actually. You just assume that's what they did. Which is called a "bad faith" argument.
I meant to say that I disagree completely with the specific part that I quoted above. That those comments are upvoted. And I explain my view right after to show that I have a diametrically opposite view on that affirmation. And I don’t think that part is an opinion, it is the interpretation of a fact, for which we don’t have the data to settle the debate, so it’s up for debate, and my interpretation is different.
Later I do go on to speculate a reason why the author had such perspective. Which is just speculation on my part (that’s why I used “It seems to me”). I might be wrong in my speculation, but I don’t this is “bad faith”.
I don’t want to get drawn into a negativity thing here, but I think this is important:
> And I don’t think that part is an opinion, it is the interpretation of a fact
You’re describing an opinion here. Your interpretation is your opinion. You’re certainly entitled to it and I think discussion is healthy, but I also think it’s dangerous to conflate your opinion (interpretation) of a fact as the fact itself.
I did a bad job writing it, but I am not conflating fact and opinion, I explicitly said that I could be wrong, and that we have no way to know who is wrong.
I should have worded it better to mean that the quoted part is not “non-debateable” as the GP stated.
I wanted to express that when the author says ”HN is toxic for me” it might be an “non-debateable opinion”, but when they say (paraphrasing) ”Comments that point out what is wrong about something without empathy are upvoted on HN” I think that’s a totally debateable opinion. And I have an opposing view.
> Well first, you took a well-meaning article discussing how HN can be toxic.
You can look at the article as an attack on a forum's reputation, and consequently on their users, by fabricating baseless blanket accusations of being a toxic community, when in truth at most it just shows people disagreeing or pointing out misconceptions and factual errors.
Would we be toxic if a random troll started insisting that the sky was green and the community posted that the troll was wrong and the sky was in fact blue?
As someone else here indicated, I think this is the part that implies superiority in some way (and as a result could be interpreted as to negative). Both 'as a regular' (meaning you must not be or you rank lower than me I earned my stripes) and 'disagree completely' (meaning you are totally and entirely wrong in what you are saying which always hurts).
You could have left that out entirely and your comment would stand on it's own.
Now I don't think that people need to walk on eggshells but maybe they should (sometimes).
Example let's say you met 'BIG IMPORTANT PERSON THAT MATTERED TO YOU IN SOME WAY' (in person) and they made a comment to you about something. Would you start by saying 'As a regular I disagree completely'. Maybe you might (I wouldn't) but if you think about it that would immediately set the wrong tone to what followed.
I used “regular” because the author used the word “regular” to imply that any regular would agree with him. I wanted to state that I am a regular and I disagree.
I used the word “imply” above, because in the text the author only explicitly says that a regular would see that there are toxic comments some times. But my impression, from the that and other remarks on the text, is that they are implying that a regular would agree that HN is toxic. Like they are trying to expose a consensus. So I wanted to push back and state that there is no such consensus.
And the “disagree completely” is explained in another comment.
I wouldn’t worry about the word games. The person who accused you of toxicity seems just to be looking for an easy target to attack. The other commenters are simply rationalizing lazy, snarky misbehavior.
Online, people who don't think before they post are able to post more often than people who do. As a result, the average social media post is stupider than the average social media user. Worth remembering whenever Twitter dumbassery drives you to despair."¹²
This covers it all, in my opinion. By the time someone is done posting a six paragraph long analysis that includes sources, a dozen of less pertinent comments will have been posted.
This is what the downvote feature and the flag feature are for.
Ideally, all of us are downvoting cheap humor and unrelated online trends ("first!", etc.)
It's not only an unfortunate happenstance; often it's a deliberate tactic. "Gish gallop" and "flooding the zone" are two of many terms for it. It's trivial for one troll to tie up a dozen good-faith interlocutors with wild claims of their own and demands for proof of others'. It's very hard to devise or enforce rules that would prevent such behavior (far easier to police the reactions), so it's common on practically all forums. For various reasons related to what kinds of people are drawn to computing and what behaviors are rewarded there, it's inevitably going to be even more common here.
Idiocy Saturation: I find this to be very true in many parts of the internet. What keeps me coming back to HN, though, is the outstanding signal-to-noise ratio in the comments that seems like the exception to this rule.
I value the very constructive and thoughtful discussions that happen out here. It can add a lot of value to the originally posted link! (And honestly there are many times where I have felt that the HN discussion was more interesting and profound than the article or blog post, itself...)
An idea for combatting less-thoughtful more-frequent posting: allow at most one post per day. If one gets but one chance to express something, the choice of topic and the care taken in expression may be more thoughtful.
(Or maybe one post and one reply to a response; otherwise, nobody would get a question answered in a timely manner.)
I manage a lot of spaces on Facebook and they recently'ish added a feature like this that moderators can enable on posts.
It limits users to one comment every 5 minutes.
It makes a difference - a big one. Some posts that would not have been approved end up being approved when this feature is enabled.
Instead of wars of words and knee-jerk reactions, people know they can only leave one post every five minutes, so the first few replies take a few minutes to appear. Then, responses to those responses are even more cautious.
People avoid commenting on multiple threads because they can't interact with all of them at once.
Your best and brightest people are often prolific posters who may interact sporadically and post a lot in fits and spurts. When they can't get their needs met they may leave and then others grow bored and stop bothering.
For a community as diverse as Hacker News, I've found it to be anything but toxic. The quality of posts is generally high and the people who comment tend to keep things on topic and impersonal. Personal attacks and jabs are not common and people don't just say things for the sake of winning arguments.
Of course, I don't click on every single story - I stick to the things that interest me, which admittedly are narrowing as of late, unlike in my early 20s.
The main thing I've noticed on HN is that having a contrarian mindset is rewarded, even in situations where it doesn't add to the conversation. If you read the two examples the author gave, he's actually being reflexively contrarian, not a know-it-all. In my opinion, that's the "toxic" behavior he's trying to identify, not personal attacks or glib jabs.
> The main thing I've noticed on HN is that having a contrarian mindset is rewarded, even in situations where it doesn't add to the conversation.
Is it really being contrarian, or supporting multiple views in intellectually stimulating discussions?
A few days ago there was a discussion on CORS where some people defended the thesis it made sites less secure, and others stepped in and defended that CORS in fact improved security. Both sides posted their rationales. Arguably neither position was right or wrong. It just depends on perspective.
A glass can be half full and half empty at the same time.
Is anyone being contrarian to point out either interpretation?
I think in a _discussion_ forum like hacker news, being contrarian can be very much adding to the discussion. That these comments end up on the top is just showing that it is appreciated by the community. It doesn't mean that _all_ comments are contrarian.
IMO the line the author did not seam to make clear in his blog post, which leads to some confusion in the comment section, is that being contrarian in a _discussion_ format - where all parties agree it is a discussion - is something else entirely than being contrarian to proposals from random people in real life.
It can be a little more toxic than I'd like, but I don't find the issue to be how nice people are about correcting others' mistakes. Instead it's the undercurrent I occasionally see of reactionary politics and weird misinformation. It's not usually horrible, but I tend to stay away when the subject turns to politics or social justice.
Without knowing any statistics on the demographic of HN, I would assume that it really isn't that diverse speaking from a cultural ground, but rather that we have a place that accepts disagreement a lot (or at least doesn't punish you as hard compared to other places). Which can be seen as a form of diverse-ness I guess?
Did HN do any kind of survey to demonstrate their user demographics?
And it is absolutely toxic on certain topics, particularly anything economics related or that challenges capitalism and the "line go up" mentality of the VC culture. If you offer anything that criticizes that at all, you're in for an earful.
Everyone with strong ideological passions thinks that HN is stacked against them ideologically. People routinely say that not only about the community, but about the mods. These perceptions are entirely predictable from the passions of the perceiver.
Who's right? Neither. It's exactly the same perception, just with opposite polarity, because the polarity is coming from inside the person.
More precisely, both are right in the sense that HN generates enough data points for everybody to run into whatever they dislike the most; and both are wrong in that they dramatically overweight that sample, because that's what the brain does with samples like that.
What makes this perception so common on all sides is that HN doesn't partition the site into like-minded siloes (e.g. follow lists or social graphs or subforums). Everyone is in the same big room, so everyone is frequently bumping into views they dislike and normally don't have to deal with as much, at least not in their home base. The irony is that this is actually a step closer both to reality (society is divided on divisive topics) and to genuine tolerance (bearing the presence of what one dislikes). There's more about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
I don't think HN is stacked against me ideologically, quite the contrary, my views are fairly pedestrian and middle of the road for the West Coast tech industry.
I do think that when it comes to politics and social justice HN is content to let people who aggressively hold certain viewpoints have an outsize role in the discussion, despite engaging in toxic behaviors that wouldn't be tolerated on other threads. This may be because the people running the show here are sympathetic to such views, or maybe they're just naive.
No we are not "content" to do that, and generalizations like this are notoriously unreliable. I'd like to see specific examples, and I'm sure interested readers would appreciate links as well, so they can make up their own minds.
A particular user is aggressively confrontational towards every queer/POC person who makes a negative comment about the Midwest possibly not being safe for certain groups. In a conversation about a technical topic, this type of behavior wouldn't be tolerated. In this case, it was, and possibly valuable discourse was derailed.
For purposes of comparison, there's a critical discussion about MS Teams today with a hundred comments. I wouldn't expect posters who respond "what are you, some kind of Slack shill???" in such a thread to last long here without moderator action.
Seen this double standard consistently over the years and it's one reason myself and others keep their distance from this site.
If it seems to you like there's less moderation happening on that sort of comment than there is on comments complaining about corporate product, I can see how that would lead to resentment about how HN is moderated. I wouldn't want to be part of such a place either.
Because there's a degree of randomness in what we happen to see, and we can't moderate what we don't see, there are some comments on every topic that end up not getting moderated. If it's a topic that's particularly important to you (I don't mean you personally, but any reader), bad comments going unmoderated on that topic are going to make a more painful and deeper impression. This perhaps leaves the sense of a double standard because more pain has been caused by those comments than by others.
I don't know what to do about this other than remind people that we don't see everything, that the likeliest explanation for egregious comments going unmoderated is that we haven't seen them, and that we welcome heads-ups about egregious comments that we're missing. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
dude the fact that you are sooo touchy about this and jump immediately to the defensive with this sea lion shit the second someone impugns the conversational style of hn. it really undercuts that sense of detached impartiality you like to front with otherwise.
anyway man we made up our minds already that's kinda the point. hn has a lot going for it but it also sucks pretty hard, in some ways that are very difficult to quantify but nevertheless are real! I'm sorry that hurts to hear and I'm more sorry that you're so sure it can't be the case that you can't see it.
This comment is far below the expected HN standards of civility and decorum ("you are sooo touchy about this" and pointless accusations of "sealioning" in response to a reasonable question would not be generally OK here). I point this out not so much to engage in foolish 'tone policing' and purposely ignore its substantive points (such as they may be - the OP is actually more helpful here! And you have quoted a New Yorker description elsewhere in this thread that also provides a valuable outside perspective; we of course appreciate that) but rather to point out that HN takes criticism of itself very seriously, to the point of routinely giving comments like this one what amounts to special treatment. As a user base, we really, really want to avoid the tone-policing trap. And we'd like to see accurate information about these things even when that's hard to quantify.
that is the point I'm trying to make. we judge comments on how well they adhere to our standards of civility and decorum, but not by their actual effects.
having a mod jump on you demanding peer-reviewed validation if you criticize the place is bad, even if they do it civilly.
hn surely does "take criticism seriously" in the sense that when any is detected, it is fully and publicly focused on. but in all the cases I've seen it comes with a hostile degree and intensity of interrogation that makes it hard to believe it is a good faith exercise in organizational-self improvement. it just puts such a high burden and consequence on publicly pointing out the faults that people don't want to do it.
shit I try not to do it on purpose because it's such a draining unpleasant experience to be the center of attention of dang and whoever has decided to be his crew for the day.
being civil doesn't protect you from these arguments! these things are bad, no matter how civil people are being about them. and I am sometimes not that civil about them, but that doesn't make me wrong, or a moral inferior to people who can keep their cool.
On the contrary, I think HN is trying its best to be a broadly appealing place for intellectually curious folks, especially those who might be interested in tech and the business environment around it.
HN demands other things beyond civility and respect for others of course; we're all well aware that civility alone does not suffice. But it helps enough that doing away with it is clearly unwise, most of all during the sorts of vigorous debates that arise quite naturally in any discussion-focused platform. (Including very mainstream ones like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc.) This is not a "moral" point of view, but one that's driven by solid observation of what happens to overall quality when incivility and personal attacks are allowed to fester. Many of us have been on Usenet after all, and can draw from that experience.
> demanding peer-reviewed validation if you criticize the place
This is not what has happened here, and long-time HN users should be well aware of that by now. No "demand" was made backed by mod privileges, least of all any sort of "hostile interrogation", what I saw was gentle pushback, most likely aimed at trying to find ways of making any criticism actionable and part of a potential "exercise in organizational-self improvement".
I also take some issue at the implication that I share dang's outlook on these matters, to the point of acting like his "crew". What I did was merely to point out that your comment was phrased in a way that may well have turned many HN users off from its relevant points, but that it did nonetheless have substantive points to make.
I can't even really engage with this because it's not what I was talking about? any political issues here are far downstream from the larger ones mentioned in that new yorker quote above. which are, sorry to say, completely on display in those two comments.
the point I guess I'd like to make here is that you can be either ruthlessly rational data-bound defender of hn's honor OR impartial mod who applies the rules as written. but not both. or if you have to try to be both at least use an alt or something because these really should be separate roles at this point.
I think it's more important to be as I am, with whatever messy contradictions show up. Partitioning that into abstract roles feels weird and false to me. I wouldn't like to work that way, and it would make the relational aspect between mods and the community much harder. Since the relational aspect is the most important thing, that would be a bigger mistake.
The toxicity is there it's just subtle and disguised. Here's a typical one you see on HN that is used directly to escape moderation:
"I find it odd that even when someone tells you the logical outcome you still deny it."
"It's baffles me and is so interesting to see someone behave this way even though it's not logical."
It's this intellectual arrogance where the commenter acts like he's some sort of hyper intelligent savant observing creatures of lower intelligence that is completely toxic. Whenever I see that type of garbage comment, I think dude... the other person just disagrees with you stop talking about him like he's some animal your observing in a laboratory.
> It's this intellectual arrogance where the commenter acts like he's some sort of hyper intelligent savant observing creatures of lower intelligence that is completely toxic. Whenever I see that type of garbage comment, I think dude... the other person just disagrees with you stop talking about him like he's some animal your observing in a laboratory.
Enlightenment ensues when the meta loop is closed. All criticism winds back on itself, including this comment and the next comment commenting on it...they keep wrestling to get outside or on top of each other.
The singularity of meta-commentary is a deep belly laugh.
I made the same realization in myself, but unfortunately in my 30s rather than my 20s. Engineering, whether software or hardware, is all about thoroughly understanding a problem and dissecting it to the nth degree. The better you are at this, the quicker you notice the problems with an initial, creative idea.
"It's easy to be a critic."
If left unchecked, all that is done is the refinement of a skill that is able to find the potential hurdles/blockers in any problem space.
However, when part of a balanced team this attribute can save time going down dead-end paths. But it requires a yin to the yang - a perpetual optimist that won't take no for an answer.
For those of us that are on the analytical end of the spectrum, it is important to realize that noticing an early issue does not equate to the problem space being a waste of time that is unsolvable.1 Instead, use your super-power for good to accelerate finding the efficienct solution to the problem that some has identified and clearly expressed (which is itself itself a super power; and you may have just found your startup founder).
Well said. It is often better to “learn it” later I think. You may have higher standards for learning and instead really mean integrating and internalizing it.
When someone writes a blog post, in my experience, they are often only expressing an idea or reaction that they will soon leave behind.
You really have to separate your life from comments on hacker news. Did a website really make you decide to be a dismissive jerk to your girlfriend and father? I'm glad you are at least recognizing your behavior and hopefully taking steps to improve.
> You really have to separate your life from comments on hacker news.
Except, that's not how human brain works. You learn whatever you see often. That's why it's considered counterproductive to learn by bad examples. The common brain learns by repetition - it doesn't distinguish if what's being repeated is good or bad.
> Did a website really make you decide to be a dismissive jerk to your girlfriend and father?
You'd be surprised! If you're not influenced by regular behavior you encounter, then lucky you. Most of the rest of us do get influenced by simple things like the people's accents, to how they deal with anger and other emotions (e.g. learning passive aggression from a co-worker).
The point is, that the author is trying to point out Hacker News - a discussion forum - is toxic for having a reflex to give contrarian opinions. Wheras the author is doing it in real life in settings where not both parties agree it is a discussion in the first place. That is the toxic behavior, but he tries to paint HN as being toxic.
Hacker News is the absolute pinnacle of non-toxicity on a site that allows essentially everybody to contribute. If everybody is going to have a voice, somebody is going to be offended by it. If you consider this toxic, you consider message boards in particular and the internet itself in general toxic.
HN definitely has a toxic "shoot it down" mentality when new things are presented. As an example, I recall a post where someone posted a browser-based implementation of some very nice airplane cockpit instruments, and I was not at all surprised when the top comment was about how stupid and dangerous it is to try to implement flight controls in a browser. The controls were intended for training purposes. It's as if the prevailing attitude often starts with "your idea is wrong and stupid and I know better even though the first thought I've ever put into the topic was 30 seconds ago."
I often just shake my head at people's inability to sit back and appreciate what's interesting about something, rather than try to find things that are wrong with it.
Rose colored takes on new technology are not in short supply. What's difficult, is to find well reasoned and thoughtful discussions that pick apart new ideas.
Yes, discussions on HN tend to bend towards the latter, but it's a useful counterbalance to the larger environment around technology.
I agree with this, but "I implemented $protocol in $lang and blogged about it as a learning exercise" or "I think these controls I made are nice and wanted to share" aren't things that need to be subjected to the Idea Thunderdome, and it just comes across as shitty behavior.
Shallow, and mean hot takes are also not in short supply (not implying that about your response btw). I think that HN has an admirable goal related to this as part of its guidelines:
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
But I feel that it often isn't lived up to. I feel like I've seen a lot of criticisms here that add nothing of value. And even among the ones that do, they are often needlessly provocative. I shake my head every time I see a "I completely disagree" here. I mean sure, that's a fair thing to say, but I doubt it's true nearly as often as it's said. I think more often than not it's an ego-driven response. And that's just one example of what I perceive as a bit of a common, negative tone here.
But I'm not just jumping on the hating on HN bandwagon either. No place is going to be perfect. I find a lot of value here. There are some really thoughtful comments. Even some of the rude ones are sometimes informative. I'm not aware of a better community and I'm not sure if it's possible for this one to be better. It is what it is, as they say.
>What's difficult, is to find well reasoned and thoughtful discussions that pick apart new ideas.
Unfortunately, that's as difficult to find on Hacker News as elsewhere. What we do get plenty of is aggressively ignorant hot takes and middlebrow dismissals and Dunning Krueger effects when the subject veers outside of the programming/CS wheelhouse. It's common enough that one might as well not even bother with the top subthread most of the time because it's bound to be the "this could have been trivially accomplished with FTP[0]" part of the conversation.
You're completely right. It's toxic everywhere. BUT just because it's toxic everywhere doesn't make it so you get to call HN the "pinnacle of non-toxicity."
It's like saying the least toxic venom on the planet is the pinnacle of non-toxicity... I mean it's still venom.
It's also worth talking about the toxicity on HN because it follows very specific patterns. It's also essentially a dictatorship. Whatever Dang says goes.
> It's like saying the least toxic venom on the planet is the pinnacle of non-toxicity... I mean it's still venom.
If all you see is toxicity, wherever you look around, then perhaps that warrants some introspection and a review of your personal definition of toxicity. Odds are you're picking way too many false positives.
I'm responding to someone else who mentioned that toxicity is everywhere. Please address the overall topic, instead of making a personal remark about me. Thanks!
Yes there is a difference and despite that difference it's still a dictatorship. The thing is, whatever Dang says goes. That's the definition of dictatorship.
I think you just agree with him. Dang is a dictator whose policies you agree with, but ultimately you have no say in anything.
No, I do not always agree with the moderators or their entire approach.
I do recognize this is nothing like a democracy, and the less like a democracy the more you have no say in anything.
But it still ends up a better place so that's what counts to me, and I highly appreciate the effort that goes in and the creativity seen when difficult things are handled way better than could be expected otherwise.
>But it still ends up a better place so that's what counts to me, and I highly appreciate the effort that goes in and the creativity seen when difficult things are handled way better than could be expected otherwise.
So you don't agree, but you feel despite your disagreement it makes HN a better place. So in a sense, you agree that his decisions are for the better.
Ultimately you didn't contradict anything I said. It is a dictatorship. You just agree with the outcome of his policies. We can caveat that with the fact you may not agree with individual policies but you agree with the overall outcome.
Yeah, if you want to see how bad it can really get, head on over to slashdot. I used to hang around there in the 90s and 00s, but it started going downhill and I left. Went back recently and wow has that place gone to hell. Just full on flamewars with cursing, vulgarities, and name calling in the comments. That kind of behavior would never fly here.
Humans absent an accountability structure are toxic.
Accountability structures are provided by real in person institutions that have standards. For example, nobody is spurting toxic speech at their fellow churchgoers, because there would be a personal price for that.
The anonymous Internet for better or worse removes much of the skin in the game for commenters, thereby incentivizing toxicity.
For all its faults, it's still the best place to discus things; including controversial topics. My experience on other platforms is significantly less good.
I guess that with thousands (tens of thousands?) active users there's no real way to filter out all "toxicity", and neither should we. Some people are just a bit more abrasive, or state things a little too absolutely, or are a little bit too critical.
I think part of building an inclusive and diverse community also means accepting that people aren't perfect, and not be overly sensitive about this. Of course there are limits, but sometimes people get a little bit over-sensitive about "toxicity". You do have some amount of choice whether you "take offence" or not. Part of that is just adjusting your expectations, and also reminding yourself that they probably mean well even if they're coming off as a bit of an ass. Exceptions apply, of course, and of course there are limits: personal insults are right out, as are condescending dismissals and such. But someone being a bit too arrogant? Meh.
Part of the problem is that unlike a coworker or friend with whom you have a relationship, almost everyone here is a "stranger": you never had a beer with them, or went bowling, or whatever. So less-than-great interactions stand out as a single data point for an entire person, rather than a single data point among many. Add to this non-native speakers, different cultures, etc. and it's easy to become dismayed, especially if you spend "several hours/day". Remember that negative interactions register much stronger, too: for every HN conversation where I end up being frustrated there are dozens where this didn't happen.
I think that's a good thing, as these things have a tendency to devolve to "shouting matches" quite quickly. I've never ended up on the "wrong side of the mod tools" and I've frequently engaged in conversation on these kind of topics, often with a viewpoint that doesn't match the current US "politically correct" one (I dislike that term, but I can't think of a better way to phrase it concisely right now). Just remain respectful, be on-topic, and write more than a one-line dismissal or the like and you should be good.
Kind of a recently I had a friend get published in Nature, have her work featured on the BBC, and inevitably that was posted here to HN. The work was actually revolutionary, something that in college I had been taught was impossible, she had made closer to being possible.
There were basically 2 types of comments on HN: "Don't get your hopes up, they only got this to work on mice" and "is it ethical to do this kind of research in mice". Valid comments sure, but these are equally valid for every single research endeavor performed on any animal model, and no discussion was given to the technology that had been discovered/invented that could save countless lives for the rest of human history.
Since then, it's been harder for me to take criticism here very seriously.
The HN term for it (invented by pg) is "mid-brow dismissal" - when you reply to an article with something that applies to the general class of articles, but isn't a problem for the specific article because they knew that too, because of course they did.
The key to HN is not to take non-tech-specific controversial things (like this thread) seriously.
If the author wants only the non-toxic parts, stay with threads on Boeing plane safety (where aeroengineers chime in), startups (where the CEO answers), Zig (the language designer is always here), Rust (some folks from the core team are always hanging around), or some weird detail of a processor/GPU/TPU/AWS/low level M1 processor reverse engineering.
Also don't talk about cryptocurrencies, no matter if it's good or bad.
Yeah, that's been my approach. I definitely steer clear of anything politics or politics-adjacent here, because I've found a lot of the conversation pretty disappointing and often toxic.
Anything about crypto, Apple, Google, Tesla, etc all have a mixed bag of good content and hater-type comments that make me eye roll and move on.
But for all of that, this is still my favorite social media site.
The original threads on the Boeing 737-MAX safety incident had plenty of toxicity. Many people here were outright angry that such a massive screwup could be allowed to happen, and made sure to let everyone else here know about it, in the strongest possible terms. Arguably, that "toxic" anger helped save lives by making it apparent to outside observers just how serious the problem was.
I like this kind of post. Here we've got somebody thinking it through trying to be a better human. Nothing wrong with that. We're all better for having done some of that work.
I don't know, I think there are all sorts of things that can influence our behavior, why not an online forum? A random example, in the past when my friend and I were doing some manual labour work in construction, some of our family friends noticed how we started swearing more. I think this type of social chameleon behavior is very common. We adapt to fit the groups we are a part of. And I think it's totally reasonable to say that a community like HN would influence your behavior if your spend a lot of time interacting with it.
Besides, I think the author's point is less that HN made them act a certain way and more that they've noticed a lot of negativity here and that we should be aware of that.
It's too easy to give a glib answer, and feel justified because you're right.
I work hard to post helpful, constructive, conversation-advancing remarks instead. I fail regularly. But sometimes I get it right.
Some simple moves I make to help me be more positive:
Remove the word 'you' from my comment. It's rarely helpful to put words in someone's mouth, or deconstruct another comment. I try to limit my comments to my own ideas. It's so very easy for others to read 'you did blah' and feel indignant. I don't want to generate that. Looking for the word 'you' in my post is a red flag that the post isn't advancing the topic.
Accept criticisms, and respond in a meta way if at all. Getting bogged down in a dictionary definition or arguing who's statistic is more pertinent is low-leverage discussion.
Ask questions as often as making declarative statements. Offer new information and ask if it helps illuminate the topic. That adds something, opens the way for further dialog, and admits a topic may be more nuanced.
Anyway, thanks to those that helped me understand that winning karma points is not the real point.
I think you're blaming your own personality problems on HN. I'm sorry that you wrote your Dad off without helping him, but it's completely appropriate that a commenter here will tell you you're wrong without sitting down and helping you. We're not your "Tech Brothers", but your Dad is your Dad, so treat him as such.
Stepping back a bit: why are you telling people they are wrong if the goal is not to help them? Why are you commenting on this site if all you want to do is say people are wrong without providing further feedback? Serious question, not intended to be snarky at all.
Being told you're wrong is helpful. It helps you build up a correct view of the world and figure out the right direction to go. If you're driving in the wrong direction it's better to be told that sooner rather than later, even if that doesn't tell you what turn to make.
Disclaimer: I am relatively new to HN, although I've lurked on-and-off for years.
My impression so far largely aligns what the author is saying. I see a lot of comments along the lines of "so this is the internet, it's no worse than other communities" and such. The weird thing is that response seems to come with a sort of rejection of what the author's point is. It's no worse, but it's not a lot better either. I've noticed that there is definitely a gap between the stated goals of HN (which I read carefully when I finally decided to create an account) and the reality of how people interact. There are plenty of rude comments and responses that do not follow the guidelines.
In case it's of interest, my education is software engineering. I feel that I had a similar experience to the author's. For a little while, I had too much of a know-it-all attitude and that sometimes lead me to being rude and dismissive of others. In my experience, that's really common with engineers. I imagine in other highly educated profession5s too.
I'm not intending to complain, just sharing my viewpoint as another person out there looking here. I think this community can do better and very often does not live up to its goals. But, despite that, I still find a lot of value here and I try to bring my own positivity and ignore the toxicity.
Take a look at any article that is even tangentially related to anything in crypto. You'll find a battleground of people who are die hard skeptics refusing to engage with any idea in the space. HN has always had some skepticism, but this specific topic made the more toxic side of HN extremely apparent to me. Whatever you believe about any idea, you should be willing to engage with the idea if you're going to comment here.
I hope what we all take away from this article is that we should take a step back, sit with the idea of a post, and before trying to belittle someone else's argument maybe we validate the things we agree with and question the things that are a bit unclear. It's fair to disagree and have a retort to something, but I've seen a lot of people jumping straight to a pretty aggressive, dismissive stand on here.
The die-hard crypto believers are even more bothersome than the crypto skeptics. I might well believe that zero-knowledge proofs might turn out to be the foundation of some new cutting-edge technology, or whatever. But if you just tell me the equivalent of "dude, these Bored Gorillas will change the world!!1!" that's just not very interesting on a social or intellectual level.
Apologies for being skeptical, but why would someone talk to their wife in the same tone that they write HN comments? When I'm commenting anywhere on the internet, I say what I have to say and don't worry about whether someone will read the comment, and if they do, whether they'll like what I said. My only goal is to write out things I think are true. Talking to my wife involves a rather different set of objectives.
Just because you don't know people on the internet personally doesn't mean you shouldn't care about how they would feel when reading your comments. That doesn't mean you have to treat everyone on Hacker News like your wife, but having empathy and courtesy is something that should be part of all conversations, regardless of target audience.
I've noticed that HN tends to mirror my mood. If I'm feeling creative, I'll read posts of people creating something. If I feel irritated I'll find a rantable topic. Etc...
Sonehow my brain picks stories and comments that fit me at that time. If HN gets toxic, it means I have to dial back.
Today, we have access to such an overwhelming amount of data that you can fill a day's worth of media consumption just on the subset that fits your current mood or preconceived belief. Therefore, the world always appears exactly as we think/hope/fear/believe it to be.
It's like when you go to a bar and the DJ is playing songs that just perfectly reinforce your mood. Except we are the DJ and our record collection is infinite.
Now I try to remind myself that my mood will affect the media I see and vice verse. I try to deliberately focus on media that is actually nourishing and not just confirming whatever I'm feeling.
Sadly, that's just how the world is and has been. If you have to avoid it for your mental health, rely on loved ones and math/tech manuals and writing.
Racists who aren't A) doing it as a troll or B) trying to make a career out of it, are actually just normal people trying their best to understand the world. If you have the strength to help them, you should; if you don't, it's alright to retreat for a while.
I get a lot of interesting ideas from HN, the comment quality here is unprecedented if you can look past some of the more invested perspectives.
But, for the most part, HN is my way of keeping up with trends in tech/development. And, lately, we have been seeing a lot more articles that aren't strictly tech but also science and life. And honestly, I welcome those.
HN reminds of what IRC used to be like back in the day. You make the discourse what you want it to be. I'd honestly not take a platform like this for granted.
> So many posts on HN are met with skepticism, pessimism, or just an overall negative tone.
Being analytical / skeptical attitude is fine, but many of the messages on here could be delivered with more tact. I would never post a Show HN, for example - the criticism is generally useful, but folks sure like to ruthlessly gut each other while providing the critique. I try to never forget that each "Show HN" was probably like 6+ months of blood/sweat/tears, regardless of quality.
Text is a very difficult medium in which to express oneself. I first noticed this with early e-mails. Especially dangerous if the message is terse. Centuries ago when the phrase "A little learning is a dangerous thing" became popular, writing required a pen and ink, and the (now esteemed) writers had a lot more time on their hands.
When time pressure's on, perhaps, it's easy to leave out adjectives, qualifiers, and personal tales. Perhaps typing code into a text editor all day leads to a kind of economy that isn't appropriate for humans. (Not to even get into that geek cultural thing from college; I remember getting laughed at when I admitted to not knowing how to calculate pi to any number of places.)
At least on a phone the timbre of our voices is a side-channel which communicates our intentions. Text lacks that, and hurried text? Danger, Will Robinson.
Especially for tech communities. I literally stopped following tech people on Twitter because it was a different drama every week. I learnt more about drama than I did about tech which was why I was following them. I stopped using some reddit subreddits because it was so toxic that it wasn't worth being part of.
Hacker News is less toxic than one might expect it to be, given the widespread historical association of Y Combinator with DVFs (a Bay Area acronym meaning "Domestic Violence Founder", referring to the high rate of DV issues involving startup founders). YC has cleaned up its image of late, and I think SamA really did want to make it better, but it's still YC and capitalism is still capitalism.
You'd think that a website supporting an organization so dedicated to capitalism would be filled entirely with toxic personalities, but in reality, it's only about 50% toxic. The other half are genuinely interesting people who actually want to make the world a better place (although, if they do what capitalism wants them to do, they will fail in doing so).
"I’m smarter than you, so I’m going to pick your ideas apart and tell you exactly why you’re wrong."
Early on, someone told me never to sell to IT, because IT types love to try and point out where you're wrong, and to catch you out (I'm one, I get it). Sell to business people instead - they're just looking for workable solutions to their problems, it's not (usually) a pissing contest.
It’s funny that we view this with disdain but are ok with unlimited kindness at the expense of correctness. Both ends should be tempered so we do not favor one over the other. Otherwise, you end up with things like “lived experience” and “emotional safety” becoming axioms of debate - which is a disservice to the truth and our society.
The vast majority of HN comments care much more about being right than being kind, and this has also been my experience within the tech industry in general. I doubt that the author thinks that unlimited kindness at the expense of correctness is the ideal.
haha, I found this funny and accurate. It captures what I feel is common among the toxic responses that make it past moderation/downvotes. HN has an acceptable way to say "#$!@ your ideas" and "I'm smarter" using intellectual or polite sounding words, but it's still the same thing. I might even prefer the more crass approach that gets filtered out. At least those are honest and not passive aggressive.
I've been grinding karma in this game for nearly a decade, my stats are the same, and I'm still stuck with this default skin and no good loot. Rate up is a lie!
If you're still looking for something to fill the void, I'd suggest an RSS reader like NewsBlur. I've been bringing in blogs that I've seen on HN into my feeds. I could easily see myself snoozing the feed (a feature of NewsBlur) for HN for a few days if they have a bad day and start repeatedly throwing fits about cryptocurrency again. There's plenty of content in my other feeds that holds my attention.
Also, hey, I hope you add an RSS/Atom/JSON feed to your thoughts section. Remember to put the meta tags linking to the feed in the HTML!
There's been a few threads asking for blogs, most of which probably have feeds, here's the one most readily available from my browser history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30245247
I'd concur with another post way up-thread that there's a kind of "HN voice" that gets you a pass on moderation, but you can be very nasty while staying within that, and usually threads are full of that kind of thing.
HN is a great place to learn to put the "aggression" in "passive aggression".
> there's a kind of "HN voice" that gets you a pass on moderation, but you can be very nasty while staying within that
That is what they call social skills. Knowing where the line is drawn and how to say things without being too offending is social skills, they navigated the social environment to get the results they wanted.
Sometimes you turn over a rock and there's beauty beneath it, sometimes the revealed snake bites your hand. There is still value in turning over the rock for when the diamonds are found.
"My dad told me that he wants to dabble in programming, but MySQL isn’t compatible with his laptop. My response? "Yeah there’s no way that’s true. MySQL will work on anything." Instead of taking a look at this laptop and working on the problem with him, I just told him that he's wrong and he doesn't know what he's doing (basically)."
Now I just want to know if MySQL really was incompatible, and if so, why?
I think this is putting the cart before the horse: rather than this mindset being caused by HN, it's more likely that people with this mindset are attracted to HN. I certainly sympathise - I find myself thinking the same way; but I ascribe it more to the profession I'm in (software engineering), and - probably more accurately - to a certain captious way of thinking that maybe led me to this profession.
So many posts on HN are met with skepticism, pessimism,
or just an overall negative tone.
I cared more about being right than being kind.
My ideal self would exhibit both kindness and skepticism. I don't always live up to my goals, but it's possible for a pessimist to be kind and considerate. If anyone needs an example, Mark Twain probably fit the bill.
I have a couple of years on the author, but he's right. I think it's similar to what happens on reddit or any community that seems to attract the "my IQ is north of 125 and I know it" crowd. I'm guilty of generating some of that toxicity too.
There are still tons of gems on HackerNews and I usually try to limit my interaction to engaging with that content and bypassing the comments altogether. HackerNews is at its best when it's sharing useful content with people and at its absolute worst when you try to engage with that person who's wrong on the internet. Aside from stroking one's own ego there's nothing to gain by engaging with people to try and set them straight.
In sum. Sharing is caring and that asshole on the internet is still wrong.
I do think HN is less toxic than I'd otherwise expect it to be, and I attribute it to the very good moderation. The rules of conduct are pretty simple and designed to promote non-toxic discussion, and I'm impressed with them. I recently got gently chided for "one of those grandiose sweeping claims that internet commenters love to make but can never back up" and was forced to see that dang was right, and that he was operating on a solid principle.
And I really do love HN for its ability to cut through bullshit. I frequently see topics and look at the top comment or two before even reading the article, because I know HN can be counted on to cut to the substance a high percentage of the time. Clickbaity titles are reduced to TLDRs. Headlines ending in question marks are reduced to "yes" or "no" inside of one comment. Security exploits are often boiled down to how it works very quickly. The scrutiny this community adds to random tech jibber-jabber is frequently a really big time-saver.
On the other hand, while HN avoids some of the shit-show type of discourse that tends to happen on these types of forums, it does definitely have its own set of very predictable patterns that I'm starting to get really tired of:
* "Why would you want to do this?" when the point of the post is a fun exercise
* Rust bashing, go bashing, rust zealotry, go zealotry
* Downvoting things because you simply disagree
* Smart people assuming that because they have always been able to reason their way through most technical subjects, that they can reason through social, political, and legal subjects without any real direct experience, because they're smart. Results in declaring simple answers to complex problems such as housing, healthcare, drug policy, education, the law, etc etc. Simple answers abound. This one is endemic on most discussion sites, and here at least both sides get to talk, but the scarcity of people admitting they don't know all the answers is ... exhausting.
HN is no different than anywhere else. Majority of replies are hot headed, critical, cynical, and negative. You can have the most inspiring news, a huge innovation, big leaps in tech, great new products, and 95%+ of the comments are just sad to read, which leads me to believe that it's just human nature.
And no, critical thinking doesn't mean shitting all over everything you come in contact with, which is what most of us have apparently learnt from poorly taught college classes.
The minority of us "mutants" who get excited about things, should learn and continue to spread the positivity and hopefully move the dial towards the middle a bit.
And ye, this post is negative — I'm not a cartoon character in ecstasy state all the time.
It is not so much HN that is toxic, but in my opinion there tends to be a lot of inadvertently (...or not) toxic people in our industry.
There are a lot of people I have worked with who have very strong opinions on what is the right way to do something. They will have zero qualms about telling you that anything-other-than-their-way is flat out wrong. I have been sat in meetings where it was basically a full-on argument between people for 30 minutes about if we should use X or Y to implement some feature until after perhaps 3 or 4 meetings and endless threads someone either capitulates or managers step in and force the matter. It becomes a point-scoring/pride thing where the same old foes face off against each other again and again and the cycle is repeated.
It is stifling quite frankly, and I have often simply given up having an opinion at work sometimes because it is simply not worth (from an emotional energy perspective) joining the fray. Just let whoever shouts loudest/longest get their way and go home at 5pm.
It is not surprising we get that here in HN if we are seeing it day in and day out in our offline lives too.
I don't really believe there is such a thing as toxic kindness when that kindness is genuine. Smarm, on the other hand, is disingenuous by definition and can be extremelly toxic.
When I think of Toxic Kindness the concept of mollycoddling comes to mind. There's an emphasis on avoiding negativity and criticism as not to invalidate someone's feelings. Growing up I remember being told, "If you have nothing nice to say, don't say anything at all". Roughly, that represents the general concept.
But what I've found is that a lot of the toxic positivity types still hold a lot of negative emotion. However they can't express it without some justification. That justification usually comes in the form of attacking someone who has committed a transgression of expected kindness.
"But what I've found is that a lot of the toxic positivity types still hold a lot of negative emotion. However they can't express it without some justification. That justification usually comes in the form of attacking someone who has committed a transgression of expected kindness."
I notice that too. It seems some people look for a social hedge or 'permission' before they'll say something disagreeable to save face.
I'm not so sure I buy the idea that holding back disagreeable opinions or observations is an act of "kindness" per say. To me it seems more like trying to navigate social relationships with tact. I can loosely see how holding back the urge to "let that son of a bitch know what I really think" can be construed as such but I don't really believe that fits the bill either.
There's a massive difference between the idea of kindness coming from a place of understanding where you're letting people know you see their struggle and genuinely believe in their inherant worth and ability to overcome or cope with those struggles vs subtle or overt manipulation for the sake of being socially placating.
This entirely depends on where you're cutting off "normal" for "toxic" on either end - but toxic kindness can lead to an echo chamber that builds a false sense of confidence, spreads misinformation and generally deprives you of your ability to empathize with other people - toxic negativity can lead to depression and suicide... so I don't really think it's fair to equate the two - both are bad, but one is worse.
This is a weird thing for me to get out of this, but...
"You’re going to come across comments by billionaire CEOs who just so happen to be replying to a deepy-burried reply."
Makes me wonder if one of these CEOs is someone I've pissed off on here in that past.
A little more on point... I think it depends on how telling someone they're wrong is expressed. If I'm here to learn something, then hopefully people do pick apart why I'm wrong (which implies an explanation and usually links to pertinent facts). I think much of the negative parts are misunderstanding, miscommunication, or perpetrated by a small number of trolls.
I mean… sure, the comments can be negative or dismissive at times. But toxic, compared to what? Dinner conversation with close friends? Perhaps.
any other pseudonymous forum on the entire internet?. No!
The stakes are higher at dinner because your face to face. So dinner conversations are actually LESS toxic. People on HN are hidden behind anonymity. The only defense is moderation.
I would say unless you have an opinion about something that is very different from the status quo you will rarely encounter toxicity. If you do have opinions that are very different from the norm, the toxicity is rampant.
I think perhaps what counts as toxic varies. If you lay out an argument of say why NFTs are great you might not just be met with negativity. Perhaps by dozens of replies. But is that toxic? With actual toxic behavior I mean what goes on in a Call of Duty game chat, or most YouTube comment threads . The actually toxic behavior is completely destroying conversations, not just filling them with negative responses. To see exchanges of (say) three messages without one being homophobic/racist
/spammy/.. is really common on HN. That immediately puts even the worst HN discussions in the top percentiles of online discussion.
> If you do have opinions that are very different from the norm, the toxicity is rampant.
In that there is disagreement or that the disagreement is presented in an especially toxic way? Because obviously arguing something that is way outside the norm will see most people disagree strongly (by definition) so one would expect negative and dismissive responses. That though doesn’t make for “toxic” discussions so long as everyone argues in good faith and is civil?
>In that there is disagreement or that the disagreement is presented in an especially toxic way?
Yes. Some people will disagree amicably but the majority of the time this is not the case. Many users use subtle degrading tactics (negs) to propagate the toxicity.
You think I'm just interpreting disagreement as negativity. No. I assure you I am not.
I'm starting to think the concept of something being "toxic" is borderline nonsensical. It's sort of a word that has been repurposed to identify the inherent tragedy of the commons. It's like a non-religious version of "fallen" nature of man. I'm not religious, but I grew up with that term thrown around with a sigh.
To illustrate what I'm thinking of... things that are "toxic": people experiencing road rage and people who cut in lines of traffic and the people who honk at them in anger, people who talk during movies and the people who shush them overtly, hecklers at shows, etc...
Any situation where there are quasi-anonymous status, and challenges to any social transgressions are powerless at best, and unhelpful at worst, will lead to "toxic" culture. Yea, it's not all good vibes, and people can be assholes. The reason I'm still on hacker news and reddit and NOT on twitter is exactly because the voting mechanism and reasonable moderation is the best defense against the amount of insane sociopathy on the internet.
It is interesting though, for people here like the author, for whom there is no expectation of the tragedy of the commons that I do worry a bit about. If you find the city intolerable because other people can be assholes, move to the suburbs. If you find hacker news intolerable because of the assholes, sure get off the internet, but the problem isn't the internet, the problem is the human condition.
Perhaps the idea that you can, or should, replace social media with yet another website where you spend 20% of your waking hours is misguided. Like so many things in life, the dosage matters.
> Or another example: My dad told me that he wants to dabble in programming, but MySQL isn’t compatible with his laptop. My response? "Yeah there’s no way that’s true. MySQL will work on anything." Instead of taking a look at this laptop and working on the problem with him, I just told him that he's wrong and he doesn't know what he's doing (basically).
Yeaaaaah this was fucking eye opening for me and now I need to go re-evaluate a bunch of things.
Thanks for this piece. I have a lot to work on now.
I would turn this around and flip the script. Hacker News is valuable to me because people don't pull punches out of the sense of social obligation to be polite.
While people can be harsh here, generally there's almost zero tolerance for ad hominem attacks and the kinds of sophistry you see elsewhere on the net.
Think of it like this. If I want a pat on the head and some affirmation, I'll talk to my mother. But if I want straight dope on what I'm doing right or wrong, this is a great resource.
Pulling punches while still getting your point across is valuable. Being abrasive detracts from the message and leads to flaming due to tone rather than content.
There's a lot of sub-text hiding under the phrase, "You [HN] are toxic." It is strongly implied that this is a problem that needs to be solved and the only way to solve it is for HN to change to become less toxic.
I dispute that. The problem is not that HN is toxic. It may well be, but that is not what matters. If you think it's toxic, the solution is not to complain about it in the hopes that HN will change to better fit your model of non-toxicity, the solution is to stop spending multiple hours of your life every single day using it.
The world is full of toxicity. That will never change. It's part and parcel of being alive, of having to compete for resources in a Darwinian world, a direct and necessary consequence of the laws of physics. The way to avoid toxicity is not to try to get rid of it because you will fail. It is to simply choose not to spend multiple hours every day wallowing in it.
> If you think it's toxic, the solution is not to complain about it in the hopes that HN will change to better fit your model of non-toxicity, the solution is to stop spending multiple hours of your life every single day using it.
It might still be helpful to complain if it causes some people to rethink how much time they spend on, what they're getting out of it, and possibly reduce that time (if they come to the same conclusion as the author).
Complaining about HN's toxicity when you're spending multiple hours on it every day is like an alcoholic complaining about the fact that it's easy to buy liquor. It's not an entirely invalid complaint, but the problem is that it's not actionable because prohibition doesn't work. The only viable solution for the addict is to find a way to stop drinking.
Being critical or skeptical is easy. It's a low-effort approach to encountering new ideas. It's fine most of the time because most new ideas aren't going anywhere, at least not anytime soon. So there's little-to-no cost in rejecting them.
But it's a boring way to go about things. I can't speak for anyone else, but it certainly doesn't engage my intellectual curiosity, which is the purported purpose of this site.
A few years ago I made up an exercise for myself. I resolved to look at every startup in each YC batch for that year. I went to Tech Crunch and read their Demo Day reports and the short blurbs they had on each company.
For most of them, my reflexive response was that they were dumb or pointless or unworkable. Fine. Noted.
But then I made myself come up with best case scenarios for each of them. What if this does work, what's the best possible outcome? What's the bigger picture that this could be the entry point for? If I was given this startup idea, what would I do to make it work?
This was of course much more difficult than simply dismissing the ideas. And it was ridiculously time consuming since there's now 50 bajillion YC teams every season.
But it also turned out to be very enjoyable. I got hooked on it. Letting my imagination and analytical skills run in optimistic, problem-solving directions. And now I have a much fuller and more capable toolset to use when I approach new concepts. It's paid off for me in concrete ways in my professional and personal life.
Considering the best case take and how you'd make it real is a habit I very much recommend.
I like it here but HN can be a bit much, it takes itself way too seriously. To balance/negate the grandiosity and toxicity of HN, it's best to occasionally visit some satire/circlejerk forums specifically about HN (favorites include: n-gate and PCJ). Only then will you get to enjoy the full HN experience, while having a laugh at the unintentionally hilarious/absurd side of it.
But seriously, thew world is toxic, rejoice if you ever find a place you feel is not toxic, and then lament that it will invariably become so. Or recognize that the simple happenstance that led you to find it will also be it's downfall because other people will find it via the same means and either you or them are not welcome by a portion of those already on the platform.
> I’m smarter than you, so I’m going to pick your ideas apart and tell you exactly why you’re wrong
Eeh, if that affects you so much, that tells you much about your ego. People pick your ideas apart and tell you exactly why you’re wrong, not because they're smarter, but because they may offer you a different perspective. It's up to you to take that with a grain of salt, or be salty about it
>The article explains that people who are "intelligent," or just over analytical in nature, end up being less happy. They see through the BS of everyday life and are able to spot the negatives faster than any positives.
Positives and negatives are completely subjective. Personally I welcome people pointing out the flaws in my reasoning or understanding, and see it as an opportunity for growth. "Seeing through the BS of everyday life" enables one to see just as many positives as negatives - especially to those whose "everyday life" isn't so positive to begin with. Some people go through life seeking affirmation and avoiding anything that conflicts with their predispositions, which is fine if that's what works for them (and they aren't in positions of power or making consequential decisions). Plenty of us find the "animating contest of freedom" (in the words of Samuel Adams[the man not the beer]) to be positive and liberating, but it certainly isn't for everyone.
> The article explains that people who are "intelligent," or just over analytical in nature, end up being less happy. They see through the BS of everyday life and are able to spot the negatives faster than any positives. This is the problem with HN: The community is too smart for its own good.
Starting from the position "this article's POV is true, and a relevant POV here" and jumping to "and therefore HN is too smart for its own good" seems a bit under-justified. Also the whole "if you're so smart, then why..." thing has always had its own "I'm clever, check this out" signaling aspect too. It's a subjective hand-wave of its own and it kind of muddies the waters here.
I think it's interesting to keep in mind that some people here have shared that they are measuring their happiness using third-party tools and methods, and checking out just fine. Or they have made huge strides to overcome challenging mental illnesses and taxing life lessons. Those events can even become so exciting that they obscure one's ability to effectively attend to others' pain and suffering, when that is appropriate.
So I'd add that despite your best efforts, you can be very happy and also come off completely toxic, which highlights the POV that toxicity is a very subjective perception.
If you really want empathy and kindness to happen more often in an informational community, IMO it's a good idea to separate that informative effort (which is laudable on its own) from your effort to critique the community at large. Such info-driven communities often have signs and guides all around which signal that more community critique has been received than can be meaningfully processed.
(P.S. The "People get so smart that they see through all the BS and therefore become unhappy for all their intellect" trope can be really damaging to personal growth. It may be a stage of exhaustion reached after a period of growth-stress, and it may be a stage of imminent breakthrough. We also may not have the right socio-cultural tags and memes to help people understand how to contextualize and mine the follow-on stages for resilience and improved mood levels. So I wish we could be gentler and more nuanced with our analysis of this particular issue. There are some hints that such stages can even lead us to see our ideals reached meaningfully without wearing ourselves down so much, and that's a huge mood lift by itself.)
When we're reading a short written comment (or tweet or what have you), we are reading it in a certain tone in our heads. This tone is entirely made up by the reader and ascribed by the reader to the commenter. It is not necessarily representative of the actual tone it was said in.
This tone is affected by our preconceptions of people, by those who conditioned us to feel that way. It may have little to do with reality.
The highly editorialized short-form content that was the only thing possible with limited airtime and print space has been abused by the traditional media for their own benefits and benefits of those who have seeked to control them.
Unedited long-form conversations are the future, the kind popularized by the podcasts... or long speeches... or even long articles... and online forums. It is possible to get a well-rounded view of people, even those you disagree with.
HN seems to be a good way to engage with people of different views. It doesn't have to be "toxic" to disagree and argue.
I don't really expect soothing words, I expect honesty. To me that is actually a more sincere expression of kindness.
Engineers are certainly fast with critique which is not restricted to online spaces. But I want to hear that in most cases. I think it is often far more insightful than naive positivism, especially since so many in tech now work for advertisers or there is much content on crypto-currency hype. At some point cynicism can become pathological, but so can being wide-eyed. There certainly is a point where everything is talked down, but I don't really see much of that to be honest.
Negative moods can be as contagious as laughter, but you have an easier life if you remind yourself that angry people do care. Maybe more than they should, but that can itself be endearing if you try to understand their perspective. And isn't complaining about toxicity just falling into the same trap?
There are definitely cliques of thought on HN, it is probably good that politics is largely off limits.
I do not like Microsoft being of an age that saw the anti competitive behaviour and trashing of open source but there is a large group of pro Microsoft people on HN (It is OK).
What would you like to see more of or less of?
The only "toxic" thing I've seen on HN this week is an article with panders exclusively to HN by attacking HN for toxicity.
Faux controversy, faux outrage, and bland terms of abuse broadly applied to entire communities are the hallmarks of contemporary low thinking designed to get attention without any creativity.
When Hearthstone first came out, the community asked why some cards were so bad. The creator replied along the lines of "they're to teach the community to identify bad cards and learn how to build decks with good ones". HN is very similar. It's a good idea at its core and there are many good discussions and articles to be found. But, there are also complete time wasters and stress increasers that exist only to teach you how to carefully manage your time.
Just like you can't pick 30 random cards and stick them in your deck to make a top-tier deck, you can't click a random comments section on HN and guarantee yourself a top-tier reading experience. That doesn't mean HN is toxic, it just means that there isn't always a meaningful discussion to be had even though the subject matter is controversial.
Fundamentally, the entire issue of toxic is baffling to me as is the call for greater moderation. If you see someone you deem as toxic, ignore their comments, simple as that. Moderation ALWAYS introduces the moderator's bias. If moderation is limited to language, i.e., keep it family friendly as one of my sports communities is then it works. If it extends further as with Facebook, Twitter, et. al. then it simply becomes a biased echo chamber that benefits no one. Most folks today are simply too sensitive and think they should be shielded from thoughts that run counter to their own views. And something that many people never learned in school or in life thus far -- differing or minority opinions aren't always wrong whether the topic is COVID, climate change, or any other current obsession.
I’ve been a real dick here, sometimes. dang called me out for it once and that made a bit of a difference. I’ve also had some pretty honest interactions that felt like the most meaningful I could possibly have with strangers on the internet, much more than I would have expected elsewhere.
It seems the poster fell into the downward spiraling “pit of despair”.
I don’t know how to touch upon the topic of “I’m smart and now I’m nihilistic” without also sounding prude. I’m a 20 something as well and when I don’t have something to do with my hands I start looking for problems with useless goals. I grew up homeschooled and was met with this unfortunate disposition of my life revolving around few topics with little variety. You can be sure I was extremely adept at these topics but my understanding of the world around me kept shrinking the keyhole more and more so to speak.
Slowing down and seeing the bigger picture is something easier said than done but it’s a necessity for people who suffer the side effects of this community. I wish you the best.
I'm guilty of this. There is a certain way to write HN comments that won't get you banned and have the appearance of being a well-reasoned discussion but which at the core are no more substantial than 2000-era flame wars. HN taught me how to write discourse in a particular style and voice, but it's the same process that's behind other stories like "Google Search Is Dying"[1]. Incentives for well-reasoned discussions tend to result in the appearance of being well-reasoned[2], rather than actually being so in the same way that SEO results in the appearance of good search results more than actual good search results and in both cases they modify authorial behavior to superficially produce content aligned with these incentives.
It's still fun though if you put on the airs of intellectualism knowingly so, then every post becomes a bit of performance art. You can subvert the expectations of the medium in subtle ways that say things without necessarily spelling them out. Treating it as a role-playing exercise detaches things just enough for me that I don't really take things to heart anymore.
the new yorker did a profile of HN and its mods a few years ago and I've never been able to get this description out of my head:
> 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. The message-board intellectualism that might once have impressed V.C. observers like Graham has developed into an intellectual style all its own.
It's just such an accurate accounting of the 'house style' around here and its limitations.
There was a great comment a while back that I can't find now along the lines of "Hacker News might not have people screaming obscenities at each other but it turns out of you dress things up in polite words you can get away with saying some truly awful things here". And, while I trust the moderation here, they are invariably drawn towards the more obvious examples of toxic behavior, making it very easy for people to continue to advocate for trans erasure, genocide, repealing disability rights, etc. all under the banner of civil, "rational" conversation.
I've been sealioned here, I've read the transphobic, genocide-supporting, and misogynistic takes, but those are not the worst encounters. There have been some utterly spooky encounters here. One in particular stands out as being like a conversation with an otherworldly being. This individual clearly had some amount of speech&debate practice and was equipped to take whatever was said in the worst possible interpretation, but framed in the most detached unaggressive manner. It was the conversational equivalent of quicksand. It keeps me up at night that some people out there roam among us.
These claims should really come with proof. Trans erasure, where? The most I've seen is people complaining about the latest fad of requiring everyone to state "what is your personal pronoun" and to sign with their personal pronouns. I'm sure that slacktivists like that sort of thing, but I doubt it addresses actual needs of trans folks.
The mod team is incredibly good at removing them, but next time I see one I can clip it and send you a link. They typically last 30mins to an hour before getting flagged.
Flagged comments can be read and even linked to, if users set the special 'showdead' option. (If you don't want to link to a comment and give them exposure, just pointing to a broader discussion would be enough to do the trick.) Then again, it's kinda weird to evaluate HN by looking at content that only the worst trolls post to the site, and that disappears basically within minutes.
I would rather not get into that discussion here because it could quickly turn into a "that's not really trans-erasure" argument. However, if you are interested in a link to a flagged&dead comment, I can work with you to send you one that I saw just six days ago.
I see troll flagged & dead comments all the time, just like I see flagged & dead spam. Normal users will never see the stuff, and it dies within minutes - the 'showdead' feature has been put in there to keep everyone honest about how the site is being run, not specifically to give exposure to whatever kind of awful comments. So it seems that we just disagree about whether trolls posting their intentionally provocative crap here tells us anything worthwhile about the actual HN userbase.
Definitely agree. If I ever did get brilliant one day and make something useful or simply exist, I don't think I would post it here. Inevitably the comments would scar me.
I get that founders quickly learn to get past that stuff, but I'm probably too much of a softy.
I think the author makes some valid points, but I don't think he makes a good argument for hn being "toxic". The headline comes off as hyperbole (but not, in fact, as "toxic").
In my experience the vast majority of negative comments on hn tend to be well founded, and mostly well intended. Contrast this with a happy photo sharing site that seems optimized for teaching body shaming and inducing self-harm, depression and suicidal tendencies... That's the kind of social media I think of as "toxic".
Or as Webster's say in part:
> 1: containing or being poisonous material especially when capable of causing death or serious debilitation
I'll always be friendly and kind to people in real life. But I come to HN for acerbic debate about pedantic topics with really smart people that have highly tuned bullshit detectors.
I hope to god this place never loses its' edge and becomes Reddit.
Exactly. I use HN as one of my BS detector calibration tools and thus crave its critical nature. I think the OP needs to learn to filter out the types of dismissive critical comments that sit that the top because they got there early and are "just right enough" to pass as authoritative judgement that buries all of the better answers that trickle in later. Once they learn to tune those out, their time on HN will be a lot better. Do we have a word for that type of post?
Serious question: do people want HN to turn into a safe space then? I always preferred the blunt tone of the forum, because in practical terms you can flesh things out faster that way, and anyway it's literally pixels on your computer - they can't physically hurt you. Hell I'm even guilty of fanning the flames further sometimes, but again I always thought it's part of the conversational culture here in order to gauge every possible angle to a subject as effective as possible.
I certainly don't want the "forced nice" tone being policed here. It will likely kill the entire charm of HN.
As a complement to your points - it's worth pointing out that "blunt" != "intentionally rude" / "personal/character attacks".
I've seen lots of people on HN who are straightforward, but don't verbally abuse others when correcting them (although they might get a bit terse) - complaining about them is very different than complaining about those who actually start attacking you personally when you disagree with them.
(I, personally, try to be a polite form of the former, but as most people who have extensively commented on the internet can tell you, it's a slippery slope)
> Or another example: My dad told me that he wants to dabble in programming, but MySQL isn’t compatible with his laptop. My response? "Yeah there’s no way that’s true. MySQL will work on anything." Instead of taking a look at this laptop and working on the problem with him, I just told him that he's wrong and he doesn't know what he's doing (basically).
> These are typical, HN-esque responses that may get upvotes online, but they hurt personal relationships.
I don't think these comments will get a lot of upvotes though. Most people here are helpful I'd say.
I have a 92 years old aunt whom I call frequently. She lives independently and has no financial concerns. All, yes all, our conversations have followed the same pattern for years: She lists all the obstacles she’s faced since our last talk; assures me that no one else has ever had such bad luck; briefly asks what’s up with me. I listen to her quietly, and reply with everything is fine. We then say the love you and goodbyes until the next time in a couple of days. I’ve discovered that you don’t have to be 92 or my aunt to pour the negative on every occurrence.
HN is really, really negative. Like overwhelmingly negative. I am sure there is "curiosity" in some amount but it's the minority. I keep coming back to it for reasons I don't know.
This was eye opening, and it probably explains one of the reasons I'm so sucked in by Hacker News.
I have had a similar problem of being overly critical handicapping me in social situations. It's also hurt me professionally, I lost a big promotion specifically over unnecessarily criticism that I thought was just being logical.
Interesting Experiment: Go through your own comment history and see how many upvotes your purely positive comments have, and measure them against your pedantic corrections of others to see what is rewarded on this site.
Is it possible you are just not parsing what they are saying properly? Ie, in the "dad example", he literally said ~ "mysql isn't compatible with my machine". What he was actually trying to communicate was probably "mysql isn't working on my machine".
ie, give yourself a break, maybe you aren't trying to be clever, maybe you just aren't parsing meaning very well? It's sort of two phases - parse the literal words, then parse what they likely meant.
Comments can be good but easy to get downvoted, unlike reddit. It's easy for things to be taken out of context or misunderstood. My advice is to make sure you state your positions as clearly as possible. This is not twitter: use as many words as needed to avoid ambiguity. Make sure you have read the post or submission you are replying to as carefully as possible. If wrong, do not clarify. Instead either edit the original post or move on. That may get more downvotes.
HN posts can show a marked lack of empathy, but overall quality is much better than online in general. I think the moderators deserve the credit for this, so I want to say that I daily appreciate their efforts.
One thing I would criticize is the use of [Flagged]. I've been paying attention to its use for a few months now and I've noticed absolutely no correlation between the presence of [Flagged] and how informative or volatile a thread will be. It is really just noise.
It's funny how a post highlighting how hn crowd dismisses opinions... is being dismissed :D
I empathize with the OP but I can't possibly agree HN is "toxic". It is a place were clearly a lot of legitimae conversations sparkle and unique ideas are being surfaced. I myself feel frustrated when people misinterpret my comments and downvote, but that's just a fluke. I have seen the bottomless pit of toxicity in some online gaming circles... hn is miles away.
Trying to remove judgement from my comments has made a huge positive change. I think your comment is true, and I think most of those people mean well. I just don't know that they understand the implications. I sure didn't.
> I’m smarter than you, so I’m going to pick your ideas apart and tell you exactly why you’re wrong.”
Isn't this attack one's motive, which is arguably the most deteriorating thought process? Chinese even has a saying, 杀人诛心，roughly means attacking one's motive is worse than killing the person.
To me personally, one's motive is not even important unless I'm strategizing some move. All I care about is what this person says makes sense or not.
Great article! Especially the parts about jumping to self-righteous conclusion, instead of making a space of peace available to the person whose come to you with trouble (that you can often very likely solve with a little bit of attention and care).
What would be really cool if the "hacker community" actually tried to live up to at least the standard set out by the 'Hacker Manifesto' so many years ago...
I went cold turkey on Twitter last week because it’s just so unrelentingly negative. HN is more just silly, IMO. Yes, there are dumb “just build Google search in a weekend” comments, but it’s easier to ignore bad HN comments than the unending stream of Twitter negativity. In part that’s because you can pick which articles to read comments on and which to skip the comments on.
HN has a toxic side and I think there are pretty trolls here who think they are smart (yet not really) too, yet still less compared to many of the other online communities.
As any community grows there will be toxic people everywhere, HN is still one of the best (also _some_ subreddits on this list too) communities that has a great intellectuality vs. toxicity ratio relatively, in my opinion.
"After nearly a year of using HN every day for several hours a day.."
What would that time be worth if spent building a product or service? Either for yourself or someone else that paid you for that time? I'd wager you'd learn more focusing on more productive efforts than you could from reading anything here. (and I'm a fan of HN)
Skepticism is good and valuable. Iron sharpens Iron. HN isn't toxic, and a bunch of smart nerds sniping each other results in smarter nerds. Smarter nerds is a net benefit to humanity. Arguably.
There's probably other places for continual positive affirmation but I can't think I can't think of any on the Internet off hand.
Haha I think that's true. I wouldn't say HN is toxic but the pedantic nature of so many comments is exhausting.
And there are a lot of strongly opinionated engineers that can't imagine that tech they dislike or they aren't familiar with may actually be better at solving many other problems.
Everyone gets caught up in trying to be right, but some people have not yet realized how damaging that can be to their relationships. It may seem like it's not a big deal online, but that will carry over to your personal life.
Neil deGrasse Tyson said his father stressed to him that it wasn't enough to be right, one must be effective.
That stuck with me as a powerful reminder to try and focus on the effective part. It will preserve and build relationships and often surprise you in making you realize that when you try to explain something instead of insisting on it, you are either wrong or could be wrong.
If you're good at technology you're smarter than other people. Good to know!
The opinions at HN are like any other social medium, from useful to toxic. I would argue there is no difference in the quality here vs anywhere else, and if there is a quality difference, it's minimal.
FB is toxic. I have found HN and the super intelligent people here have taught me think a bit before I actually write a comment. There is no such culture available on FB. Like thinkers encourage extreme thoughts. Unwanted comments to or from friends that don’t see eye to eye tend to deteriorate relationships.
Reading that dark themed page I got a headache from my eyes going squirly, need to go get some acetomenphin or something, completely lost focus of what the content was saying. As far as the title, some people can be toxic, sometimes we all can, it's human nature. We just have to strive to do better.
If every single platform or watering hole is deemed 'toxic' and all they have in common is that people frequent them then I guess what that really means is that people in large quantities when they exchange ideas and information are 'toxic'.
The anonymity of online forums is like alcohol: your personality traits are going to be amplified under the influence of them. If you're an asshole, both alcohol and anonymity are just going to make you a bigger asshole.
Doesn't mean it's the fault of either Lagavulin or HN.
This is a new thing to me. I usually first/only read the comments, only if they are enthusiastic enough proceed to the link. I've always thought a lot of people do so.
It's not that HN is toxic, it's the people in general are toxic on the internet.
This also can be classified as toxic: "I love you, Hacker News, but you’re toxic"
Whenever this type of criticism is made about a digital property you need to ask if that behavior is incentivized by the design of the product or is it just human nature.
I get the general sense that people debate in good faith on here. I rarely see comment chains devolve into name calling and personal attacks like on Reddit.
Sometimes you come across a comment on here that seems a little whackadoodle, but even the weirdest takes I’ve seen at least includes some amount of reasoning behind a particular position. I mostly attribute these types of comments to the nerdy tech filter bubble we’re all living in.
I think "debate" is the key feature of HN (indeed, most online discourse) that the author has identified. It's easy to base a comment on a flaw in an article, or someone else's comment on the article, so HN discussions can seem very contrarian, almost adversarial.
Randall Munroe may have said it best with his "Duty Calls" comic:
This 20-something-year-old seems woefully under-prepared to deal with real life when they get to it. I hope they learn some valuable lessons from this post, so their skin can thicken up a bit before they grow up.
See this here^^ this is a toxic post. Telling someone to grow up because they have a contrary opinion.
This is the perfect illustration about how some people are blind to the toxicity on HN, because I'm almost completely sure that the person who posted the above the comment was completely oblivious to the fact that he himself was going to contribute to the toxicity.
It's infectious, toxicity. It keeps spreading, and faster, the more serious people take something. When you stop taking the whole thing so seriously and laugh--at yourself, first--then the tension breaks.
One thing that I didn't see discussed is the long-term effects of even passively exposing oneself to a community over a significant stretch of time. The term that first came into my mind when thinking of this was "radicalization", but I don't mean it in the usual sense of being taught misanthropic ways of looking at the world. I was a different person before I first came across Hacker News. To my younger self, I might even call them somewhat naive, if I was going for a reflexive first impression without much thought.
For example, my attitude towards adblockers shifted from when I first installed AdBlock Plus as a teenager. I used to be content with letting adblockers be my way to save me time and frustration on the Internet. They were nothing more than a cool, useful tool. Nowadays, I tend to see them as a weapon against a raging consumptive enterprise without enough meaningful limits on its ability to grow. My opinion of adblockers has become welded to a larger, more sinister feeling of discontent than I started with.
The thing is, the latter impression makes more sense to me. I feel like I've learned something new about the world in between. But when I remember it, I simply feel sad. And yet, without a source of information like HN, I might have remained gullible for much longer, unwittingly using an extension to block advertisements that was built by an advertising company.
Then there is a certain post format which tends to get a lot of traction on HN specifically. It feels like it's been on an uptick recently. It's where a news article or an HN poster without a corresponding link describes an injustice or user-hostile action that causes discontent. They tend to get upvoted heavily. People on HN want these stories to be heard. I've found that what goes on in the comments section of such posts no longer surprises me at this point - they almost always cause dozens of people to chime in and turn the discussion from the single injustice described in the post into a general "company X/product Y frustrates me" thread. "You can't forget the time product Z fell on its head. This is just more of the same."
It's not that these comments are unjustified or even toxic at points. They don't break any rules. But they simply start to wear on me after month upon month of seeing the same general sentiment unfold again and again. And perhaps the most problematic thing about them is that I agree with the most well-reasoned, critically sound ones. The more threads I read through, the more I'm reminded that this really is the current landscape of technology/society/humanity at large. But I sometimes think that with regards to those injustices, little has changed. I sometimes expect something to spark my curiosity in these threads. At times I have to look elsewhere.
It makes me feel that HN is not immune to the drama of the social media sites that usually attract reproval. It's just that HN's definition of "drama" is much different than that of social media sites like Twitter. I tend to think that I can go back to HN to avoid the "drama" of the other sites. What I was actually doing was avoiding poorly-researched, uncritical drama in favor of dense, cited, and at times intellectually stimulating drama. Somewhat ironically, from time to time a Twitter post about a user describing their gripes with company X/service Y surfaces on the front page. I think it says to me that if you wall off the term "outrage" from its usage on non-HN social media sites, and bolster it with enough critical thinking, thoughtful analysis of the bigger implications and moderation, then you can still propagate outrage. You can end up partaking in some definition of outrage while holding the belief that "those other sites" do even worse, and that HN is somehow different from all the rest.
You can feel better about outrage or drama or discontent if you think you've done the work to understand why you feel that way. But the feeling still lingers. I think that my time on HN has made a permanent mark on the way that I view the world, for good and bad. And it sometimes dawns on me that little of that critical thinking or elaborate analysis ultimately had any tangible effect on the thing that causes the discontent and murky feelings. It feels like the worst injustices or the biggest product flops are out of my control. And additionally, many of them tend to have no real relevance to my life. I am probably invested in less than 10% of the products or services or technology stacks that appear on HN. So what if Stadia is a spectacular flop, for example? It wasn't surprising to me. What did I learn from it? HN tends to make the inevitable grievances of technological life feel legitimate. But I've almost never stopped to think about just what commenting or reading through posts was meant to accomplish for me, and myself.
When I think of the word "hacker", I think of the usual stereotype of some adolescent prodigies "bringing down the mainframe" of the malignant enterprises that ail them from the comfort of their urban residence. Now it feels like I'm just watching a bunch of billion-dollar monoliths throw their weight at each other from street level, while dozens of people plea between each other between the cracks and get all of their informational bases covered. I have to wonder what would happen in the cheesy hacker movies if instead all the whiz-kid adolescents with the lightning hairstyles had to adopt the 21 million lines of code that comprise Firefox and attempt to figure out if they were capable of convincing the common masses of humanity to switch their browsers over from Chrome, before the arms race of the attention economy is lost. It feels like that's the usual day-to-day when it comes to parts of the technology sphere in the present. The stories lack the same wondrous edge. It feels like the answer is already written on the walls, and it's an answer none of us would like to hear.
I don't think the interesting question is about whether or not HN is a better community by virtue of being smaller or better moderated than its alternatives. Instead, I sometimes wonder if HN is the place that I'm supposed to be a part of in the current chapter in my life. For everything that's said about the addictive power of modern technology platforms, I don't think that browsing HN across weeks or months will send many signals that you have the option of leaving HN for a while to do things that are entirely irrelevant to HN or its users. That option is always there, but it is implicit, not explicit. It felt as if I was just entering a point where I was going to see another "Tell HN" post about a smart TV forcing an update on its users, or a 2,764 upvote post about how Reddit is becoming the most significant place for actual opinions on anything, and I was simply going along with the sea of tears because that was what I was used to.
All of this strife is completely understandable. I entered the comments and scrolled through like I usually do, like a reflex. If I had gave myself the option, I would have agreed with more of it than I had allowed myself to read through.
I know I'm being negative like your article says but your font / background color absolutely obliterated my ability to see for about 30 seconds after closing.
I had the same thing happen. I thought it was just me and my old eyes, but I imagine there is some sort of afterimage effect occurring. (Although I am sure my eyes are not without some amount of blame.)
Not to blatantly "pick the most controversial part of the article", but this explains a lot. Being analytical and having a skeptical attitude about things is not "toxic". But doing the same things and being insufferably rude about it can often be. The rest is just a matter of how you fix that state of things. Once you are so far gone as to even wear the "techbro" moniker as a badge of honor, I'd kinda suggest that you might want to change that attitude.
You might well be right about this, however the OP's post is all about relating their personal experience in a way that somehow ends up painting the whole HN userbase with a very broad brush. It just does not seem very feasible to answer that in a way that's on point, without incidentally "dipping" into the same kind of attitude.
You're probably right about the post (I haven't read it), but this is a needle we all need to learn how to thread. It's feasible, though not necessarily easy.
Thanks, I understand your remark better now. But I'm still not sure that the right choice is then to shy away from a mere rephrasing of things that are literally or almost-literally stated as such in the OP (and I don't just mean what I quoted, that was almost beside the point!), lest they then be perceived as a personal attack on OP themselves. That just seems like an especially insidious sort of projection.
I actually agree with the message. I'm just saying that there's more than one way to pursue niceness (or, if not 'niceness' however defined, at least proper respect, empathy and decorum), and expecting people to be less analytical (which quite literally means to "pick shit apart") might not be the best.
I studied psychology after I studied math, and the most funny thing that happened to me after the second: I become less concerned about truths and more about people, about what they say and why they say it.
There are two examples in the article. The first one is about nurses and masks, when author's girlfriend evidently tried to convey her compassion to nurses who need to wear masks all the day long, but the author didn't pick this message, he stumbled over untruth and was unable to just let it be. The second example is about his father, who probably tried to ask for help nicely, to ask in a way that doesn't feel obligatory to conform. But unfortunately the author saw an untruth in a message and was unable to resist an urge to start a holy war against falsehoods, so he missed an opportunity to help without realizing it.
The second example is illuminating: he missed an opportunity. Maybe he was not interested in it, in this case he lost nothing. But maybe he was interested (or rather would be interested if he picked it from conversation), and in this case his loss was very real. It is not about niceness per se, it is about seeing world around you as it is. You can be nice then, or to be not nice at all, but if you do not see where are opportunities to be nice, you are losing an opportunity to choose.
If being more analytical leads to the less understanding of the world around you, and therefore you are missing opportunities, than maybe an analytical approach is overrated?
Though I feel very empathic to STEM majors who was trained to fight a holy war against untruths and cannot resist it even when this holy war sidetracks them from the core of a conversation. It is not easy to overcome this training and moreover it may be not just training, but a natural disposition too: maybe people who are less concerned about people are attracted to (or pushed into) STEM carrier paths. I do not see their behavior as toxic, one just needs to clarify his/her message when STEM major stumbled over an untruth. It is just like talking with kids, they also tend to react to a wrong part of a message.
> I become less concerned about truths and more about people, about what they say and why they say it.
But, but... but ¡¿¡¿por qué no los dos?!?! You can be concerned about people, and even learn to let harmless and irrelevant untruths slide, without in any way diminishing your concern for things that might actually have important consequences. When I see people like the OP advocating for HN users to be less analytical or less critical about things (and there are many of them in places like Twitter), it's really hard to tell whether they're taking that difference seriously.
> You can be concerned about people, and even learn to let harmless and irrelevant untruths slide, without in any way diminishing your concern for things that might actually have important consequences.
Yes, of course. And I didn't lost an ability to see untruths, it is just my reaction to untruths became more voluntary and conscious. And as I see the argument of the OP, he says that if you didn't learn how to step over untruths, you cannot avoid being sometimes "insufferably rude about it". Unintentionally rude, but nevertheless rude. He doesn't say that one should let untruths flourish every single time.
> it's really hard to tell whether they're taking that difference seriously.
Does it have important consequences? I personally am not bothered with it much, it doesn't hinder my ability to talk with them. I can deal with it on a case by case basis, when it becomes important.
> He doesn't say that one should let untruths flourish every single time.
The point is that people who make this argument will often let that implication stand. This is clear, given how the argument is phrased - and clearest of all, I would argue, when places like HN are called "toxic" or "bad/awful" in the process. And of course the distinction has consequences. Letting untruths fester can be dangerous or detrimental to the public in some cases, and this is precisely where a hardnosed "no BS" attitude is most helpful.
Perhaps he's self-identifying as a tech bro defensively? That is: based on his age / appearance / employment, other people might dismiss him as just another tech bro, so he's just going ahead with a self-label to get it out of the way before moving on to his point.
I disagree. My experience with many engineers - suggest there are different engineering types.
There are the exacting, detailed oriented, pedantic, focused engineers who just cannot think big picture. They're great at rules based / systems following work - and love picking apart anything not based in 'immediate reality'
There are the strategic, forward thinking, open minded who cannot execute a project to save their life.
There are the directive, steam rollers who bully a team - but great at getting stuff done.
Etc. Etc. Other types, but for brevity I cut it short.
One can come into contact with many of the same "rude" type, but it's generally due to the fact that hiring in any given organization is generally based, at least in part, on "cultural fit". This means the various types of engineers will tend to segregate a bit over time. For instance someone who is a bit more contemplative may not meet the "cultural fit" requirement at a crypto defi shop, but might do well at a national laboratory. (And vice versa). This is why we shouldn't meet a group of, let's say "strong personality types", and assume that all engineers in other places are similar in nature. That's not at all how it works.
This is a good application of various behavior/personality type systems (DiSC, etc) to engineer profiles. In these systems there are personalities that will usually clash against one another unless one or both are aware of the problem, perhaps that is what the OP is experiencing and in that regard it’s not just a tech problem.
I'm suggesting not all are rude; I see many uplifting comments. A number are rude - and maybe those who are pre-oriented to replying in text on a partially anonymous board with a pedantic nature are pre-inclined to be more rude.
Engineers by design are used to problem solving or working through the problem solving. If they're not solving the problem - then they would be in "what's wrong with this approach" mode and some may see it as rude.
Is there a possibility that some people are unusually sensitive or have a persecution complex causing them to perceive the slightest push back as a personal attack?
> It's second only to my all time favorite of "I left a company, and here's a blog post about why you should care" post.
As a counterpoint, one of my genuinely favorite post is Michael Lynchs "Why I left Google" post and his yearly solo developer updates. A lot of people simply blog as a way to organize their thoughts, not because they believe people care and need to hear what they have to say.
"Why I left Google" quoted returns 7790 results. It conveys nothing of status and says more about the environment of the person who thinks it does.
I might as well read "Why I left Wal-Mart," except that I expect those articles, were they ever to be written, would show a wide latitude of interesting personal experiences, and not the self-promoting pablum that particular genre of LinkedIn fluff provides.
Personally I love the bouquet of a nice "One of my twitter posts was popular for two days, now let me spend ten pages telling you about the revelation that internet fame isn't that great".
Dunno, I fell like I've ever read 2 or 3 of those in years of HN.
And those I remember were mostly about the issues with hosting something popular and getting hit on HN or virality (e.g. the guy who made the "is it stuck yet" about the ship in the Souez canal).
Do they though? In most of those scenes 99% of the audience is other, less-famous starlets who want to improve their status by being seen in connection <big shot name in the respective industry>. They don't care at all about what the big shot is actually doing or saying.
The audience for "celebrity gossip" is billions of people. The audience for fashion (and related magazines) too. And the audience for influencers is tons of people who are not influencers and rarely any "less-famous starlets".
HN is filled with toxicity, but most of it is projected forth by people who lack the ability to take constructive criticisms, and misconstrue them as hostility. Same problem as all other social medias, except at not nearly the same scale.
> HN is filled with toxicity, especially if you have a thought that runs counter to the normal accepted way.
So what. The world shouldn't be gentle padded walls and protective headgear. That's part of what's wrong with US and Western European culture: extraordinary, pathetic intellectual weakness and cowardice rather than mental fortitude and strength. The West is soft and weak mentally - constantly crying like a spoiled brat to be protected from ideas, arguments, debates, anything disliked or disagreed with - and it's only getting worse.
This isn't that; discussion and debate is promoted here. What's not is exactly what you've just demonstrated - vitriolic language that only serves to provoke hostility and muddy the waters of real conversation.
You could have gotten across the same message by saying something like "Sure, being rude is bad, but you shouldn't let politeness descend into agreeableness to the point where people are shying away from real conversations in order to avoid upsetting people". Same message, much better tone.
I generally find HN to have a level of civil discourse that is unheard of on most other platforms online, to the point that I sometimes find myself behaving a little better here than I would elsewhere because it's just how it's done around here. I'm curious what community you'd point to that is not toxic if HN is considered toxic.
Well, for one, the corvette racer dudes I know aren't at all like what you see here with people telling you you're straight out wrong, dumb, etc. And they actively help each other when things happen. I've cut my track time short to help a dude I didnt know fix his car when it broke (we're friends now). Dude last year crashed his car and caught fire - was massively burnt to a crisp and almost died. People came together and almost $60k to help him. Then, another one of our crew had a stroke. The first guy donated to him (along with the rest of us), despite dealing with his own medical issues.
As an ex-20-something-year-old human, it comes a day when you look back at when you were 20-something and invariably think "oh boy I was just a grown-up child back then".
But 20-somethings haven't yet got there and sometimes think they are in the top of their maturity and wisdom.
I guess it's life. One day they might look back and cringe on the idea of calling themselves "techbro" like if it was cool or something. And might say "what was I thinking?" Oh well :-)
Calling yourself a tech bro is intentional ironic humor. Guys doing this are likely aware of the negative connotations but also the fact that if you are a young man in tech, other people will label you a tech bro regardless. It's just a harmless joke imo.
Yeah, the last mature adult brain functions that deal with like, higher level moral reasoning and stuff, don't come fully online until age 25 or so.
Your early 20s are still late puberty. And even as an adult, you've still so much to learn.
But I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt and say that he was calling himself a techbro at least semi-ironically. Of course in five or ten years' time, that too may become unacceptable, like ironically calling yourself a racist.
But, I was surprised that techbro has such a negative image too and used as an attack. Only found that out when I moved to Seattle. Sometimes it helps to adapt it, because for sure the community/locals on some level really do push it to a label.
Meanwhile, across the country in Florida - everyone encourages everyone to do what you want, learn, succeed and it wasn't rare that in university, outside university events IT/coders/artists and such all hung out together.
But, certain environments affect the meaning and acceptance of words. I still am flabbergasted that my experience in Seattle is still like that and that I was "shamed" for doing what I love. Seattle was the only place also that people in tech would also omit they work in tech and do anything, everything else.
There's a subset of ideas and culture associated with "techbro" beyond just being interested in technology. Obnoxiously Libertarian, overly analytical (lack of holistic perspective), crypto pumping, sometimes pretty racist/sexist (though I would say that's a subset). It's a particular cultural strain of people interested in software, not all young men who code.
These people were "finance bros" working in hedge funds before the VC/startup industry took off, and crypto became the most popular way to scam people.
Edit: actually the "overly analytical" might fall more into the stemlord category, who routinely get mislabelled as techbros.
So much work to keep up with the labels, I just do what I enjoy and so do many other people. It's sad that people just acost and label it as some sort of "bro" label and try to make it negative.
I don't think anybody "keeps up with labels" as such, and it's not about people doing what they enjoy - it's about certain abrasive personality types that are drawn to programming.
Oh my god it isn’t ironic. These people read it and thought it was just tech and bro in the cool sense.
Gather round children and let me tell you a tale about a time before it was broadly trendy and profitable to do technical work, when bros sold mortgages and stayed in sales, and we were all geeks and nerds (whether we identified as that or not).
"Bro" is a strange word, because it has gone through quite a bit of semantic shift. It used to refer to a certain type of entitled, right-wing young male associated with some college fraternities (not all frats are like that, but a lot of them are) and tech-company management. Now, "bro" has just become a synonym for "man" and doesn't really have the sting it used to have.
then maybe you're too young to remember that for decades it was just an abbreviation for 'male sibling' mixed with a little "close male friend who's like a sibling". 'bro' has basically completely supplanted 'dude', which waxed and waned before it, and like all fashion, it too will wane.
Eh, this person hasn’t really HNed imho. If the tone and tenor of the comments get you, then whatever, it’s toxic for your appetite, move on.
There’s really a deeper darker underbelly of HN where certain opinions get down voted without explanation. It’s the quiet silencing or shunning. In fact, the person that wrote this article is kind of the person that would quietly down vote, not partake in the discussion, and then one day write a blanket ‘you are all toxic post’, like a serial killer that confesses.
Personal attacks are not ok here, regardless of how you feel about how someone feels about HN. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
This skepticism and cynism is like acid where lies don't survive. It's really hard to push typical corp bs when people who 2x smarter than you (but maybe not as socially aware) are allowed to pick the lies apart and expose their logical inconsistences. Liars don't like to look like fools in public. Sometimes this acid burns well meaning people, but it's a small and acceptable price to pay.
>This skepticism and cynism is like acid where lies don't survive.
On the contrary, the hardest skeptics and cynics will often buy into conspiracy theories and propaganda simply because they can't allow themselves to accept a status quo narrative under any circumstance, which makes them no more capable of discerning truth (or dismantling lies with their acid wit) than people who only trust the status quo.
Interesting how the majority of the comments are about how HackerNews is less toxic than many other social media outlets, or how OP is simply using it too much.
The truth is HackerNews is much MORE toxic than most commenters would care to admit, and it's not because everyone is too analytical or dismissive of technology ideas (though that's part of it).
The root cause is exactly what OP is talking about - substituting intelligence for empathy.
Whenever there is a discussion of social policy in the United States vs other countries, HN - as a community of entrepreneurs and entrepreneur-adjacents - optimizes for the "freedom" of the US at the expense of all other detriments to society. That is one blindspot.
Whenever there is a discussion of racial injustices or inequalities, or of gender issues, the more radical right-wing/libertarian points of view get dramatically more upvotes over time than the equivalent progressive points of view. It's hard to tell what is the "center" line in society, in American society, in the tech industry, and specifically in the largest companies in the tech industry. But I can confidently say that HackerNews - by what it upvotes - is more right-of-center of the kinds of policies that say the FAAMNG companies promote internally (for hiring, racial justice).
Let's just say HackerNews is more sympathetic to the Coinbase/37Signals perspective than the Google/Microsoft perspectives.
Does this inherently make it toxic? Obviously my perspective on it reveals my own biases. But I would say yes, because it comes from a very fundamental dislike of the human/societal implications of technology and a privileged "it doesn't affect me, so it can't be a problem" stance. And I think for young nerds being exposed to this worldview in an unbalanced ratio skews and pulls you in a direction away from empathy.
I have been on HN for 15 years, I have spent far too much time on this site. Eventually you learn which topics will be "toxic" and avoid them (if you want to). To some extent it just maturity (or lack there of) but I actually think HN is far less toxic outside of some specific topics than other sites.
The topics that are liable to become flame wars change over time, currently it seems to be anything "Crypto" or "Online Advertising" as people have very strong feelings on both sides. I'm certainly still guilty of getting drawn in at times, especially when I feel I have a horse in the race. There is always insightful comments in these threads too.
Fortunately HN is designed to detect topics that are getting out of hand (far more comments than up votes) and they drop of the homepage quickly massively reducing the exposure. Exactly where this thread is already going.
I think the best decision HN made was not breaking the site into categories or "Sub-HNs" where specific toxic topics can grow and mutate, everything is forced though the front page ensuring a level of self moderation.
After 15 years on the site I have no intention of leaving it.