Don't be mean, it's stupid
news.layervault.com
news.layervault.com
Is Flat UI a ripoff? Yes, sure, and they come across as more than a bit sleazy. But are they in clear violation of LV's copyright? Absolutely not. In design as well as in pretty much every other human endeavor, all things are derivative. That's a core truth about technology and civilization in general. The Flat UI dude did not straight-up copy LV's stuff though. Still, he re-implemented it and he deserves to be called out for it. He should at least have given LV some credit for inspiring him.
That's where it ends though. The rest is all on LV. That DMCA abuse was stupid and unnecessary. Sure, you can blame HN for making that observation but that doesn't change the fact that it's not the observers fault you screwed up. Failing to admit that (and apparently making DMCA jokes on Twitter in bad taste) only serves to emphasize why people are upset with you.
LV, you used a bad law in questionable circumstances to shut up something that was no threat to you. Then you doubled down, smugly and with not a small amount of self-righteousness, when people called you out on your ethics.
The saddest part of this is that you could have easily turned this into an ad for your stuff. If you simply had come out and graciously acknowledged the similarities between Flat UI and your icons, people would have sided with you. Your implicit counter-argument that it doesn't matter if you're acting badly as long as it's the other guy who broke the law is interesting, but it's also far from certain things will actually turn out this way in a court of law.
This was a failure on many, many levels. Doubling down on bullying while at the same time crying "not fair!" is just one of them.
You then go on for a while about what makes them bullies, all of which is tangential to whether or not HN is mean.
I caution against this kind of rhetoric. It leads to a place where the rule is, "It's ok to be mean to people we don't like, for whatever reason."
Civility is a form of justice. It should be extended to those we respect but also to those we don't respect. Extending justice to the guilty is part of what makes a nation just. Extending civility to those we disrespect is what makes a community civil.
"Dude, you fucked up" is harsh but not mean, and while it isn't to everyone's taste, it can be a bitter pill that provides the cure. It doesn't really cross the line to mean until the intent becomes more of making someone feel bad than pushing them to get better.
In my circles, at least, 'don't be an asshole' and 'you are being an asshole' is harsh-not-mean, while 'you are an asshole' is mean-maybe-harsh. The explicit declaration of state of being, rather than observation of behavior is the differentiator.
I think that Flat UI is 95% unique, and is very well.
say no DMCA ABUSE!
If you want people to be more positive, that's admirable. That being said, this post accomplishes nothing to encourage people to be more friendly.
A sensitive person (read: designer) would call it mean. I think its just a different mode of discourse. It is not sweet or kind; it just is. No more mean than a compiler error message.
HN is, quite frankly, one of the most civilized forums I've ever had the pleasure of coming across. Of course, we should always strive for the better, regardless of what other sites do. But constructive criticism and pointing out of flaws in logic is not "mean" in and of itself.
Just because people are regularly called on their bald-faced assertions that don't hold up to scrutiny doesn't make this forum mean. What next, are we going to start claiming that cults and superstition deserve respect because otherwise someone's feelings might get hurt?
I think personality and profession are mightily correlated. To discriminate on that basis would be wrong, but to use that correlation for analysis can be very helpful.
Programmers can be just plain wrong. Then get dissected on HN, for all the world to see. That's hard to take.
But I still maintain HN is not 'mean'. And its not Alpha-Programmer posturing. Its a conversation about facts, indisputable much of the time.
The point is, if your self-image is threatened, maybe its for good reason and not because somebody is picking on you.
We should all endeavor to be more humane to others, and I'm sad to see a comment like this leaning towards a persecution complex more than an understanding of others.
Was that a requirement for posting to this thread?
I thought TFA was ironic - criticizing others for wasting their electrons typing something non-productive while it was basically criticizing others and wasting electrons typing something non-productive.
Seriously, nobody is curing cancer in TFA or this thread.
You're right in the following fashion. I assumed that folks who participated in this thread might want to be self-aware enough to check themselves before they wreck themselves in a thread about nastiness.
Some folks (i would probably dub them trolls) might just double down on the nastiness. I'd rather assume some good faith in discussing the topic.
Even if you disagree with the OP, it is possible to point out the substantive facts over which you disagree, or to point out the flaws in the OP's premise without attacking the OP.
If there's no problem, then there's no problem.
But I don't think that's the case. HN's sharp edges occasionally protrude, and maybe it's just my nostalgic memory, but it feels to me like people have been getting nasty just for the sake of being nasty (or edgy, or funny, or whatever).
People can be wrong, mistaken, misguided, misinformed, but unless they're being malicious I wish that people would more often give others the benefit of the doubt.
There is a person on the other end of that keyboard (at least as far as we, or Turing knows).
It's really hard to be critical of criticism without committing the very act you're claiming to be attacking.
Aside from arguing over the contours of whether something is or isn't hypocrisy, all being mean does is drag you down too. I'm not telling GP that he is obligated to do anything. All I've said is that his response to OP makes him come off as poorly as OP does and will not further his goals.
You can call that condescending if you want, but that doesn't really pertain to the discussion, if you assume that GP is participating in the conversation in good faith, and is addressing the OP's point.
HN Commentators take pleasure in dissections (and even more pleasure in dissecting those dissections). That can be tough for people, especially if they submitted their content because they wanted feel-good feedback or some kind of community exchange.
It is very easy to burn your fingers around here - one slip of technical details, get one fact of history wrong and you will be told. Ruthlessly and again and again. If anything at all about your content is distracting, that will be what users latch onto.
Of course it's kind of bad, of course people are often dismissive because of trivial bits to the point where they actively obstruct themselves of interesting discoveries.
But I value it's Zen-like quality. I know that if I ever were to submit something to HN, should it find its way to the frontpage, I would, definitely find out every single flaw about it. Quickly.
From a technical perspective, that is kind of neat. From a social perspective, it's about as emphatic as a meat cleaver.
Unfortunately, smart people with an opinion sometimes have a problem seeing the other side of the coin, and tend to see their point of view as the only right one.
A good example is yesterdays 'PHP is the right tool for the job' post.(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5337498) The authors point that PHP is a great tool for getting something up and running quickly without having a lot of knowledge of servers and software was spot on, but he got a lot of hate from the HN community. As a bad programmer (programming is not what I do, I've only learned it to be a better manager, strategist and sparring partner) I can tell you that PHP is by far the easiest thing to get up and running for a fool like me. Yet noone seemed to accept this fact, and came up with a whole lot of 'ruby is just as easy, you just need to install [something I've never heard of, and probably wouldn't understand], or in python you just run [stuff I don't know] on the command line [which I haven't got a clue how works] and you're good to go.
These comments weren't meant to be mean, but from my perspective they were, because I'm at a very different skill level than the peolpe making the comments. They totally missed the point that PHP works for a lot of people because Ithey have no idea how a command line works, don't know how to edit configuration files, and don't care.
The problem isn't that people are intentionally mean, it's that some people are so knowledgeable in their area of expertise that they have problems seeing how it could be hard for others, and thus end up making remarks that seem mean, but really aren't meant to be.
I bet a lot of people on HN still don't see why PHP is so popular, even though the answer is unbelievable obvious. To me.
Very useful when you want to see or confirm how somethig works. Type it and press 'Enter'. It comes with the python installation, and it's commonly called Interactive Interpreter.
- what can I do here? There are no tips, clues, or any other way of knowing what to write. The answer often given is that there are MAN pages, help files, etc. that you can bring up by typing more cryptic commands. I just don't have the motivation to sift through a whole bunch of documents that may or may not have the answer I'm looking for.
- On a windows machine CLI doesn't work out of the box. I need to install cygwin, configure it, and do all sorts of stuff I don't know about and don't care about.
- I get no feedback. When I've typed some cryptic command into the commandline and hit enter I'm presented with a prompt. Maybe everything went well, maybe it didn't. Maybe I now have a virus since I found the cryptic command somewhere on the Internet. i just don't know.
- I can't undo stuff. When I type a command and then find out it was wrong, I have no obvious way of undoing it.
The point isn't that command lines are bad, on the contrary it's quite obvious that it's a really powerful tool. It just has a steep learning curve, and not all people are interested in spending the time it takes to master it just to get a wordpress installation up and running.
The point is more that it's hard for experts to see why it's so hard to just type 'grep -lsm (er /:rt) disc -f' to make the computer magically do something. There are a whole lot of assumptions that take years to master before you can type a command like that and not have your heart skip a beat when you hit enter.
And that's okay, it's why good hackers are worth a lot of money. The majority of people however, just want that wordpress blog to work.
Apache, myqql and PHP comes in a single install package, so you download, click to install and find your home directory where you can start writing code. No configuration necessary. That's important to me, because configuration isn't what I'm interested in. Wordpress, PHPBB and a host of other stuff is the same: Place it in a folder, and run through the HTML based setup. Done. Deploying on a hosted solution is equally easy; copy the PHP files from yuor localhost directory to the host, copy the DB using the webbased mysql manager and you're done.
Also, I like the fact that there's a direct and obvious link between the files you create and the pages you see. Create something.php in your home directory and it will appear as something.php in localhost. I checked out a few other languages, and there appeared to be a non-trivial link between files and HTML.
Also, the PHP community is very helpful for beginners. Asking what an array is, or how to display the time in a snippet of HTML isn't frowned upon, but respectfully answered.
I'm fully aware of the drawbacks of this simplistic approach such as spaghetti code, security concerns, scalability and probably much more. But that isn't really the point, if I'm making a microsite for a friend, or a mockup to see if something will work I don't really care.
Ignorance of the alternatives. Ignorance of its drawbacks. Ignorance of its outright dangerous flaws. Ignorance of the horrible practices it encourages. Ignorance of the PHP community's ignorance.
Those are among the reasons many of us speak out loudly against PHP, and against similarly flawed languages, like JavaScript.
Civility does not work when ignorance is at play, and when the consequences of inaction can be severe.
I've met several people who tend to shy away from Ruby due to its community. Not the language, not its capabilties, its community. Same for one person I know with Python because her project would have definitely benefited from Django. But after an underserved pigeonholing on a QandA forum (that shall go unnamed) for making a few assumptions due to her PHP background she went with PHP after all.
And that's a damn shame.
(Full disclosure, I work mostly with C#)
I'd be interested in seeing the "QandA forum" discussion that you mentioned. Please provide a link to it, so we can judge for ourselves what actually happened in that case.
Civility does not work when ignorance is at play, and when the consequences of inaction can be severe.
It's not what you say; it's how you say it. That's the first rule of effective communication since humans were around to communicate and your inability or unwillingness to accept some deocurm in your speech isn't helping the situation.
If civility worked for the Civil Rights Movement, it will work to educate programmers. Empathy carries greater weight than chest-thumping about being right if you're trying to convince someone. The OP was an entry about empathy. Try to have some.
As for the QandA forum, I'm not giving those jerks free traffic. You don't need to accept what I say at face value. Use your objectivity (if it hasn't been ground down to a pulp by your own ego).
The good thing is that since everyone else besides you and a handfull of elite and puritan developers are doing it wrong, you should have no problem taking over the world.
Apparently the choice of language is paramount to your impact on the world.
Ohh wait...
But I also think you can offer both compliments and criticism respectfully ... and I think that may be what the writer really wants. What value would there be to a "Show HN" if all you got were platitudes?
As an aside, I quit swearing (completely) when I was 18 or so, because I realized that I knew enough language to articulate my feelings. It's led to people assuming I only have nice things to say when the reality is that I can be (I think) more scathing (in other words, the tone of what you say is important too ... especially on the Internet).
Just because something offends someone else does not force that person to think of you as "mean". I don't buy into that argument at all. I can be offended but think "That guy's just a jerk - that's the way he is" (jerk != mean). Or I can choose to think, "He maybe was a bit harsh in how he said it, but ultimately his point is correct."
You aren't "wrong" in your other ideas, but I just don't agree that offending someone causes them to think you are mean.
I try to look at the community on Hacker News like that. There are a lot of very talented people here, and very busy. It seems most people here don't want to waste time to writing or hearing what's good about something they wrote or did. They've gone beyond the stage where they need hand-holding. People are working on the edge and they want to get better, whatever that means to them, and are willing to endure some criticism to get there.
Postscript: I love the fact you almost never see a TL;DR attitude on HN.
If someone is being mean, you confront the behavior it by:
1. Tell them you don't like their tone and that it isn't constructive. Make sure you criticize the behavior, not the person.
2. Ask them if they want to share their point of view instead of trashing someone else.
3. Empathize with their point of view (the Internet makes this really hard)
If none of the above works, ignore the person (the Internet makes it very easy to not make other people's feelings your problem). Not the adult thing to do, but silence is a signal to trolls that they aren't going to be fed any time soon.
I know this should not necessarily result in mean complaints, but often it does. So, what can we do against it? Simply ignore mean comments? Take care to write better comments? Or should we just shut up when we have nothing to say?
Better then to count the meanness as validation of what you're working on and to extract the grain of truth as constructive criticism suggesting how you can improve.
(Of course, the confusion is deliberate, I imagine they hope that the association with a vibrant community will work well for Layervault and vice versa, like in Y combinator <-> Hacker News)
Layervault is trying to do the same trick for their brand.
Combine this with the fact that most people come to news sites for validation rather than enlightenment and one can expect mean comments to grow in proportion to the popularity of the site
For what it's worth, I just re-read the top 5 comments on the post he's referring to and couldn't find a single one that was mean. Negative, sure, but mean and negative are entirely different things.
> And why are you making the arrogant assumptions that we want to invest our time and energy in reading your comment too?
Well if that's not the definition of irony right there...
I was wondering myself, why? Why consume time, energy to write something that adds no value whatsoever. Why consuming that little amount of electricity required for you to type and that little amount of storage required to host your (destructive) boring comment. And why are you making the arrogant assumptions that we want to invest our time and energy in reading your comment too?"
I do think meanness is worth calling out, FWIW, though in my experience HN discussions are better than most I see online (though far from faultless, of course).
...which in turn gives me faith that when there really are unduly mean discussions, someone calling them out can actually improve things (whereas I imagine an article calling out meanness on /. or similar and can't imagine who would even read it).
This was close to the top of the front page on HN, so I'm fairly confident that they're talking about this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5339287
Nothing too suss in there from what I read, and most of the top comments are still the same as when the Design News post was made.
If you can't be bothered reading, topics included:
- Facebook steals from Google+. Google+ steals from Facebook.
- People overuse certain adjectives when describing products.
- The impact that new FB design has on advertising, particularly that ads can now take up ~30% screen space
...I don't see where the meanness is
However, what I see in that thread are valid criticisms. The article and author were self promoting the author's expertise in UX -- with the promotion rather more prominent than the article content. Meanwhile, aside from the, um, "self aggrandizement", the site violated cardinal UX rules.
Readers called him on it without using faux polite weasel words, and he says he'll fix it.
Pretty sure constructive feedback is what submitting your own material to HN is for.
That discussion lacks basic civility. A good half of comments there is not something that their authors would've been willing (or have guts) to say to guy's face. Hilariously, they are in fact being mean.
Using that as a metric is silly. Is that too mean?
...which admittedly doesn't have a great discussion, but it's not worthless.
The one you linked, though, is worth highlighting as a completely useless discussion, due to some meanness (mild as it goes), but mostly just a sad lack of thoughtful commenters, all of whom seemed to think several dozen redundant comments about the OP's headshot on his blog post was valuable feedback.
I didn't see any discussion whatsoever on the actual content of the OP.
It's more likely it's the other link that's posted - the official FB Feed announcement.
This is not an isolated instance, however. For some reason people who reply seem to always look at things from the worst prespective possible. Some are valid concerns, others not so much but you end up with a (very) pessimistic view of things if you consider only opinions expressed on HN. It makes me feel a bit sad and down.
I think this happens because people who like the post, product, etc don't know how to express appreciation in a meaningul way. Maybe it is easier to pinpoint specific things that you don't like than to be specific about a product you like. You get that overall feeling that it is an improvement but cannot easily pinpoint all the reasons why.
I also have faith that things can improve if people, instead of only writing about specific things that they don't like, take some time to also write about the small things that often go unnoticed but make great products great.
Negative isn't the same as mean.
I don't think it is Facebook's fault that some friends post this kind of things and I can't see how this comment is constructive in any way.
"Great. It isn't Schadenfreude exactly, but I hope big changes ups (that they have to make because doing nothing is not an option) like this accelerate their decline. I don't think Facebook will go away any time soon but it will become another Yahoo and that can only be a good thing for the ecosystem in terms of opportunities."
This one is like wishing Michael Phelps dies so you can win some medals.
These are just some examples. If you read the Linode thread you will also find that the top comment is negative, has nothing to do with the content of the blog post, and does not offer any constructive criticism that people from Linode could use to improve their service. In all fairness in both threads there are also a lot of positive comments and constructive criticisms but for some reasons those tend to get burried.
NB
I am British and the apparent ambient meanness level in most banter probably appeals to be quite high - in reality it is just the fact that we probably waste more of our time on attempts at humour than most other nationalities....
You can't change the behavior of a bunch of strangers with simple argument. If that's your goal, you need to actually do something more substantive.
Likewise, if you have invested in building a Facebook network, you have an interest in Facebook remaining useful to you. It's more than just personal likes and dislikes, it's long term investing.
The anti-dote, usually, for a "Don't be mean ..." request is "Don't take it personally".
To defend HN comments ... The comments are the reason why I, and I'm sure many, come here to read. Most times HN comments far out-value the original articles posted.
I remember reading the HTML Hell page: http://catb.org/esr/html-hell.html It is really annoying when someone (or groups of people) wish to be heard (that is the reason they are on a publicly available site right?) but they don't give a damn about their visitors' opinions.
I can't call a site like that friendly either. Correct me if my point of view is flawed.
The main problem is that every community gets biased toward certain trend or way of thinking and they suppress opinions against them. HN is less biased in this sense but still that exist.
Still think it's not a particularly good or necessary commentary, though.
Also, Is this a rip off of the HN visual redeux extension that was posted, or vice-versa, or is it the same person?
edit: Well, I feel sufficiently stupid after thinking this through: I'm posting a comment on "news.ycombinator.com" after all...
Which in itself of course is a perfectly valid course of action but it makes their outrage over a supposed clone of their work a tad less convincing :)
Both sites are on a company domain, added a "news" subdomain, and named the forum "XYZ News", where XYZ is a description of their audience, a positive one, to appeal to industry members.
I hope Hacker News was first, because if not, they will start harass this board over the naming thingie...
Yes, but take out the "is this funny". I've been funny many times and gotten downvoted. By the way, a penguin, a priest, and a rabbit went into a bar and ordered a drink...
For fear of being mean (and stupid) I shan't put words to what I think about this.
Mean comments are a waste of space; they take up the space on the page where actually valuable content should be.
I've always hated the "grow a thicker skin" comment, regardless -- it shifts the blame onto the victim, and is simply impossible for some people and some situations -- but the problem here is that one person gets hurt (more or less, depending on thickness of skin), and lots & lots of readers get crap instead of brain food.
I reckon this is 'mean and a waste of space' then?
I don't think I've ever seen a mean post in the context of an HN discussion that wouldn't have been improved by removing the meanness, or simply deleting it.
What I've always thought set HN above other sites like Reddit is the quality of the arguments. At the end of the day we all learn and grow by putting forward our positions on various topics and issues and seeing what comes out of it. And those positions can and should be aggressively defended as need be. If you take it personally then clearly that is your problem and no one else's.
When we start attacking the person everyone loses.
It misses all the fair points everybody is arguing over and jumps to his conclusion that 'being mean is always bad :( why is there conflict in the world?'
pff, yes, I'm mean.