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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

This comment sums up why HN has gone to shit - there's no curiosity or interest into what problems are solved by a product, just performative cynicism.

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Not sorry, I don't have to like every feature.

I vibe coded hn10k earlier this year (with options for 1k and 100k). It’s more as you remember it. Significantly better than now actually.

If you lift comment threads that have participation from the karma cutoff you chose you still get some discoverability.

I was going to publish it but .. it took like three hours and that was nine months ago. But I recommend making one yourself if modern hn is getting you down. Ultimately I gave myself a time out which also worked :)

Hmmmm, imma try that. Would be a fun weekend project. Thanks for the idea! I might throw an age exception though (plenty of great comments from older accounts with lowish karma).

> What do people find interesting about this?

I did actually wonder why this was at the top of the front page, and attempt to phrase my comment in a way that wasn’t just negative. How would you have liked me to phrase my comment in this circumstance?

"Interesting! I’d love to hear how people would use this or what this solves."

Basically, instead of automatically taking a negative tone (which turns off people or turns a thread into an argument), a more positive tone would elicit more positive responses and maybe even a subject matter expert to chime in.

This comment - "This doesn’t seem at all significant to me" - comes off as negative or closed minded. We can already infer you don't understand the significance or usecase (nothing wrong with that), but the way you said it comes off as standoffish.

Notice how almost every response on your thread is now negative. If you set the tone to negative, all you're going to get is negative, combative, or non-constructive comments.

Is there any way to keep positive tone without having to lie that I find something interesting when I very much do not?

You could just say nothing and move on.

But what if I want to ask what people who aren't me find interesting about this? Am I not allowed to do that?

Politeness is not lying. And the biggest issue was the second unnecccesary sentence in their reply.

When politeness requires me to make statements that are factually incorrect, especially statements about my own personal feelings - then yes, politeness is lying! This is exactly what people mean when they talk about toxic positivity.

Would you consider the original comment to be in positive tone, and replied to it as such rather than if it consisted only of the first sentence - "What do people find interesting about this?" - and entirely omitted the second? If not, what would it take to make it truly positive, without resorting to making factually incorrect statements?

How do you know when something is performative as opposed to genuine?

Constructive versus non-constructive criticism.

It seems to me that’s a really good way to measure a kind of quality of a criticism. Without mind reading technology though, I have never understood how we could see that something is “[virtue] signaling“ or “performative“.

Sometimes things in technology tick me off, and I vent about them for a few sentences in a comment. It’s genuine but some folks think it’s somehow for show. Ah, if you have time for a relatively short thread, from a couple months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49045463

Now, in that example it was more like an open letter so you may disagree with the assessment of the reply, but it may show the difficulty of being able to accurately infer when a person is putting on a performance. Maybe it’s safer to give our opinion on response quality.

Curious for your thoughts! Thank you.

That's a political thread on HN so everyone's going to be a dick.

Haha, am not trying to criticize you here, but feel like your comment is very ironic, to the point of being squarely in the camp of hypocritical (haha, you know, “performative cynicism”). It’s all good:)

Oh it's absolutely ironic, but I've also grown tired of how HN has degraded over the last 3-5 years.

I know the complaint has been banded for decades now, but the platform has gotten really insufferable after COVID.

Gotta get your kicks somewhere ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

:-)

I feel like a few online communities went this way (Eternal September has become Eternal 2020). That said, seeing familiar names and vibes around HN keeps my spirits up, as do little subthreads like this :)

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