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Comment by brigadier132 | Hacker News Reader

Ugh substack, I can't believe you use that platform.

Jk, but I feel like we've seen some variation of the above comment on a thousand hn threads. Somebody commenting about the design being distracting or something completely derailing what was otherwise an interesting article.

I really hate when someone puts something out there and the first comments are just shitting on the person. And often people just assume the worst about people and always assume they have the worst intentions.

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A useful AI tool would hide all comments mentioning:

- problems with JavaScript

- problems with the platform the article is hosted on

- how this author’s experience, like everything that has ever happened in world history, is just survivorship bias and thus can be disregarded (this one is a personal pet peeve)

This is one reason HN is often not-subtly mocked. We condone the behavior by not shutting it down. And the negativity consumes a lot of the air in the room.

I don't know. I feel like criticism on HN is usually at least well-founded and obvious dumb takes get downvoted immediately and then we just move on. In my limited experience, reddit and other platforms are much worse. I read HN on my way to work and not my local newspaper because the community is much less toxic.

It's a mixed bag on HN. Reading about some programming-related stuff sometimes convinces me I don't want to talk to other devs anonymously at all because it's an endless well of pedanticism, gripes about people doing it wrong, and really bad takes that serve to ensure discussion remains at a relatively basic level.

>reddit and other platforms are much worse

This can still be like being the skinniest kid at fat camp. If social media in general is bad for your mental health, I don't know if it's a ringing endorsement to be the "least bad for your health."

Fair. I for one enjoy all the technical expertise that's present in the HN hivemind and every time I visit the front page I learn something new. The "mostly software but sometimes a wikipedia article about geology" nature of the platform really strikes a chord with me and I just choose not to read discussions that are 10 layers deep.

Years ago, I stopped coming here for a fairly long time, because I found all the criticisms to be accurate and off putting. But when I came back after spending that time reading things more on twitter and reddit, I found the experience here incredibly refreshing.

I think it's just that two things are true at once. All the mockery and criticism is accurate, but I think it's also the case that the signal to noise ratio here has remained unusually high for an unusually long period of time. (Probably due to years of tireless thoughtful moderation.)

I completely agree but have we gone full meta? Being negative about the negativity? ;)

Here's preemptively complaining about people who will complain about complaints about complaints.

Complaints about complaints make sense!

Just look at this thread here, it's cliche at this point:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40154731

Ironically this is the topmost comment as I write this.

Outside of Medium which gets shat on for good reason imo (used to be good, now a mess of paywalls) I've not come across this sentiment.

I'll probably start noticing it now though, frequency illusion and all, cheers for that haha

One unexplored aspect might be the difference between medias allowing upvotes and the others : I would expect that in the first ones, readers are going to feel that they did a good enough job of being supportive by just leaving an upvote ?

(Even worse for medias not allowing downvotes but still comments : now the only way to signal negative feedback is to leave a full-blown comment!)

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