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"The students found the writer voicing negative opinions much more intelligent and persuasive than the one voicing praise."

Well, this resonates. One of the things I do when scouring online reviews is to search out the negative reviews. I dismiss reviews that are irrelevant to the product itself and do (what I hope) is a reasonable job filtering out the less-informed negative reviews. When I find a good, informed negative review I tend to search through that particular reviewer's history to then find what they HAVE reviewed positively. Because I do tend to think that person has more expertise/knowledge.

Until I find a good, informed negative review on something they've rated positively.

An aside: This site has lovely design.

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Resonated with me a lot. As a faculty member college students would rally around a critic (no matter how illogical their words) and attack someone creative with criticism almost out of habit openly in class.

Also I have seen religious people constantly rally around negativity for decades and it always rubbed me the wrong way. This also seems to be the idea that the negative stance is seen as the most intelligent. I have years of Theology and learned 3 dead languages to better understand Theology and the scriptures and yet some yahoo with a high school education will have the upper hand ever talking about Kindness or Trust or Love. The message of fear is very powerful and sadly the message of hope and love is seen as weak.

It's not just the students. Faculty members do it. Board members do it. It's a cheap way to look smart and can lead to a toxic environment if left unchecked. It's much harder to make positive work than to criticize.

"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.

And a man's foes shall be they of his own household."

I guess I go with Nietzsche's idea that Christianity is an inherently negative faith. There isn't anything inherently wrong with that, but you're basically trying to live divine law in a material world. That's not exactly going to bring out the kind and trusting in people, even if the divine law is love.

Frankly my opinion on the majority of religious people I’ve met is that they aren’t actually religious and just want a club that encourages them to be a bit nicer, bit more prudent, and where people are a bit more friendly. Sometimes I worry that they are messing with something immensely powerful as if it’s a toy but perhaps it’s not my place to consider that

I find negative reviews better since they tend to have actual discussion of issues and flaws. If it is someone giving 1 star because of the post office or because Wolfenstein dares to portray nazis in a bad light you roll your eyes and move on.

I think a positive review could have a similar impact but it would need to be really detailed like say "I did the math and this is the optimal price point for data storage vs cost".

The issue mentioned of expected rank inflation from unrealistic standards is probably why. We are used to cheap crap being called awesome and the greatest thing ever and filter out the noise.

Negative reviews are the anti-marketing it is no wonder people pay attention.

My guess is that in pre-technological times, you were sticking your neck out when you criticised something.

Saying "XYZ" is great is just an expression of wanting to fit in with the group, and doesn't require explanation.

Saying "XYZ" is awful is probably hurtful to someone nearby, and you're going to have to think about what exactly is bad about it. And not only is it bad, it's so bad you are willing to risk the happy consensus in order to help the group.

Of course things that worked in small, close groups might be gamed in larger, more loose ones...

> An aside: This site has lovely design.

Took me over a minute to figure out that JavaScript was mandatory. This nullifies any amount of loveliness for me. JavaScript shouldn't be required to read text, dammit.

You could argue that HN is similar, where the highest comments are often the most contrarian. Which isn't to say they're not always valid, but I think it's important to be aware of this pattern.

Either we agree and elaborate, or disagree and eloborate (which is hard when you simply don't have additional knowledge). If we just agree, we upvote, because there is nothing to say, right? So that itself shifts the "pattern" some more.

I remember it also being like that in the small forums I remember fondly. We didn't have upvotes, but I still noticed that agreement is shorter than disagreement. But that was fine, since we kept talking through the months and years, we actually learned a lot. The flamewars very never so bad because we were few and close enough to be able to not "stop" them, but simply throw all fuel into the fire right away, and then cleared out the air after it was all burned. I remember a guy thanking us when he finally got around to not being a bit of a racist anymore.. We ribbed on him occasionally for several years, but never in a mean way, and he ended up writing us a thank you letter style post. I forgot all the details, but I'll never forget that actually happened. Still proud of that guy whatever the nick was ^^ That really can only happen in small, long-term communities, I think. Maybe it's simply not possible to "scale" that indefinitely, because it's about human capacity.

Whoops sorry, I only just saw I messed it up a bit (other than "eloborate" :D), but can't edit it anymore, I meant to write:

> either we agree and elaborate (which is hard when you simply don't have additional knowledge)

meaning in that case we can only upvote, i.e. just agree and don't elaborate. I more often find myself agreeing with comments than in a position to add anything to them.

I had a conversation in a forum recently about something like this. This particular forum has a kind of upvoting system but no downvoting system. Occasionally there's threads asking to put in a downvote system or asking why there isn't one.

The general consensus tends to be that it's easy to just agree with something but if you disagree with a topic or post it encourages better conversation to have to explain your stance and why you disagree.

I've posted on those forums for a long time and generally i notice this is what tends to happen more as opposed to a place like reddit, or even here sometimes, where a post just gets downvoted away with no counterpoints or discussions.

One could also suspect that HN readers tend not to waste their time on "me too" comments and that they rather put their time into a controversy.

I find positive reviews are usually useless. Every positive review is the same, but every negative review is negative in it's own way.

> An aside: This site has lovely design.

That line makes your comment look unintelligent and unconvincing ;-)

I find the narrow column very unpleasant; on my screen it forces a lot more scrolling than should actually be necessary for how much content there is.

Wider columns are harder to read. That's why newspapers and magazines typically divide a page into slimmer columns.

https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability

I know this is the conventional wisdom, but it just doesn't match my experience; I can't stand to read these thin-columned websites.

I look at reviews which are in between the lowest and highest ratings, in order to discard possible "ballot stuffing", and to find reviews which may be more nuanced.

I do this too. But from other comments in this thread, I wonder if 5-star and 1-star comments are significantly more influential than 2- to 4-star comments?

>> An aside: This site has lovely design.

The design is very neat, but I found it's actual readability on my MacBook Pro to be awful.

Wait... is he actually saying the site has nice design, or was that a joke?

I thought it was a call back to praise being dismissed and thought less intelligent.

No, I was being earnest.

Interesting. I'm on Windows and I tend to find sites with custom fonts render terribly, but this one is quite pleasant.

The fonts render correctly - they are slightly large, however, and there is an absurd amount of space on the left and white sides of the page.

There's a strange sort of parallax-scrolling effect where some items actually hang off the side distractingly.

It looks more like an example of funky design rather than something designed for readability.

This is all IMHO.

It looked great on the iPad, really readable.

Optimized for mobile maybe?

It's unreadable by default with Javascript disabled on Firefox, but Reader View fixes it.

Reader view has rescued many a reading experience! I'd love it if I could set it as the FF default for opening webpages.

iPhone legibility is excellent, didn’t even need to go into reader mode.

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