This is a great example for something that I always advocate: Don’t react to early responses on a HN thread. Wait a few hours (a day?) to really have a feeling of what people are saying as a community.

In this follow up she is answering a lot of negative comments about her first post. Trashing HN while doing it. But then you take a look at that thread today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280610

I did a quick review of the top root comments (i.e. the most upvoted ones, the ones the HN, as a community, mostly thinks represents their opinion). The first 6 or 7 are fully supportive of her take, empathizing with horrible onboarding processes, saying they would do the same as her. Then comes a couple of comments mentioning how she is getting flak and referring to a lot of top-level negative comments. This shows that (obviously) she wasn’t delusional addressing negative comments, they were there at the top a few hours after the post was published. But, again, these comments were supportive of her, saying the negative comments were unfair. Then it comes more 5 or 6 posts still supportive or neutral or orthogonal to the point.

Then, only the 14th root level comment is a truly negative one (one that she addressed in her follow up). And, for me, 14th is too far down to matter. Or to represent what HN is as a community.

This shows to me that HN, as a community, was fully supportive of her text, her tone, her take, and her actions. This is the reaction that was overwhelmingly more upvoted by all. Only temporarily felt like the opposite.

That’s why I always wait a day to really grasp what’s the overall reaction of HN as a community to any particular post (if I happen to care about such opinion).