I love you, Hacker News, but you’re toxic

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 catch myself doing this, without realizing it far too often. It's good to catch yourself and try to change.

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.

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.)

¹https://twitter.com/G_S_Bhogal/status/1492256294023143426

²Apologies for the wording, I personally would have avoided using "stupid" and "idiocy"

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.

"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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sonehow my brain picks stories and comments that fit me at that time. If HN gets toxic, it means I have to dial back.

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.

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.

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.

If anything, HN can sometimes be overly moderated.

The most toxic posts are when people talk about politics. I wish there's a way for HN to sectioned those off.

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).

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.

HN is a very advanced level in this game, with high standards for gameplay, but it's very much a part of the game nonetheless.

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!

But I've also met very smart people who helps others a lot and cares about how they feel.

I think it's about emotional intelligence a lot. Do you have it or don't you.

Now I just want to know if MySQL really was incompatible, and if so, why?

  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.

No one should do this.

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.

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.

* edit: not having proper bullet lists :)

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

Well, there's yer problem right there. It's not that HN it toxic, it's that you're addicted to it.

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.

Perhaps it's due to Dang? I think HN demonstrates that, in order to be civil, you need strong moderators.

Like how film has picture and sound synced, communication has the message & the mood.

Text is mono.

It has a lot of advantages. Text is an asynchronous, information dense, machine parsable, parallel communication medium.

But it really is one track communication.

With live chat, forums or IRC, you gotta accept emotional communication is rocky at best.

Shit happens.

There are ways to fix this, but they involve writing longer, slower emails, and replying days later.

Which ain't what y'all here for.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

There is hope.

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.

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.

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719

2 - Such as sprinkling in footnotes like this one.

I get that founders quickly learn to get past that stuff, but I'm probably too much of a softy.

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

> toxic waste

> a toxic radioactive gas

> an insecticide highly toxic to birds

> 3: extremely harsh, malicious, or harmful

> toxic sarcasm

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.

I certainly don't want the "forced nice" tone being policed here. It will likely kill the entire charm of HN.

> 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 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.

This has mostly amounted to developing a habit of excising or refining passages which seem: unkind, unnecessary or off-topic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

You nailed it!

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.

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)

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.

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.

People love typing more here, that's for sure.

It's not the platforms.

Doesn't mean it's the fault of either Lagavulin or HN.

  ```
  ! 2021-07-30 https://news.ycombinator.com
  news.ycombinator.com##.subtext
  ```

Maybe like, stop doing that

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.

But recently I purchased a tub of LEGO bricks.

Leave hacker news out of this man.

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.

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.

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.