Negative comments

When I click a link on hacker news and end up on a project page, it’s generally all positive. You go to some new kickstarter and you don’t see “This product I want to build is alright.” You see “This new thing I’ve got is AMAZING!”. Every startup landing page tells you, at length, why it’s the best thing since sliced bread. Most github project list off all the things they’re good for.

When I click on an HN project link, I generally get a page telling me how awesome that project is.

So when I go back to the comments afterwards, I want a counterpoint. I’d like a list of things wrong with the glowing self-review I just read. I handful of “Gee, that’s nifty!” comments might be nice, but they don’t really help me evaluate the thing I just read about, and they’re not terribly useful for fostering interesting discussion.

This isn’t as critical for some software products where I can reasonably evaluate their merit on my own, but there are a lot of areas where I’m not an expert. If some post comes along with a tool that it claims will revolutionize farming, I’d love to have someone with a strong agriculture background come by and explain why it’s not nearly as good as advertised.

Of course, there’s a long ways between “this is shit!” and “This is neat, but here are some flaws.” I’m all for criticism being constructive, rather than destructive, but let’s not throw out useful negativity. When people put up sites telling me how awesome something is, it’s quite valuable to have reasonably well informed people arguing the other side.

>So next time you read something, try this: Instead of looking for the parts you can prove are false, try to find pieces you can learn from.

Who says the two are mutually exclusive? If you seek the truth of something, then as a reader you should do both, and as the writer you should welcome constructive criticism. If I were to write something that had inconsistencies, false assumptions, or driven by an agenda other than seeking the truth, no one would be doing me any favours by not pointing it out.

I suggest that the problem is not criticism, but what drives it, and that there are two different motives for criticism (although both can exist simultaneously in an individual): One is the pure search for truth. What drives this is a strong sense of wonder and curiosity at everything. The other is ego, whose trademark is that it usually ruins everything it touches and turns everything into a fight/competition instead of learning and cooperation.

The blend of ego vs. integrity behind criticism is usually evident in the ratios of information vs. demagoguery that are used.

I'd therefore change the suggestion to "next time you read something, check whether it's you ego or your curiosity speaking before you reply, and if it's more of the former, double check that you really have something to contribute before hitting 'send'".

And of course, I welcome any criticism regarding the above opinion :)

Despite feeling this way, any time I go back and read my own recent comment history, I am shocked to find that most of my comments are still corrections/disagreements.

This is a big problem on Wikipedia. In the old days, five years ago, most of the self-promotion on Wikipedia was by bands and DJs. Now it's companies and rich people. There are at least three rich convicted felons, famous for their crimes, with their own paid Wikipedia editors trying to launder their history.

It helps if the negativity is not anonymous. That's why I edit under my own real name.

Too many turn into critics rather than creators because saying to the world "this is what I stand for, this is what I created" is so much harder than to simply tear someone elses down.

The US is actually much better than Europe but unfortunately academic disciplines and craftmanship are mostly separated in the education system when they should never have been separated to begin with.

Its a shame really cause creation is what matters. And yes I understand the irony of my comment :)

But I don't think Nick's saying "don't make critical comments" here. This sentence encapsulates the idea quite well:

    But I fear emphasis has shifted from critically
    reflecting on and examining our own beliefs to simply 
    criticizing and pointing out errors in other people’s work.

I suspect it's just always been the case that many people are bad at this. It's just that the internet has democratized and scaled up the process of getting poorly thought out negative opinions about your work.

The ones I dislike are uninformed or overly emotional.

The sooner those lies are shot down the better. I have been reading a lot of financial articles lately, and i have to say at least half of the financial editorials i see peddle some idea that is false and/or extremely harmful to anyone that believes it.

A critical mind is absolutely necessary to survive in modern society. And when one expresses critical thinking one is just helping others.

Of course as with anything one can always go overboard. Some people exhibit a type of reflexive negativity, they simply dismiss everything that is new and different without thinking much about it. I think PG called this "the middlebrow putdown." One should always consider things carefully before criticizing in public.

But saying negative comments are bad in general is just wrong.

What I believe is really happening is that it's hard for a yes-man to add any value to the conversation. "What great points you have! Totally agree! +1" is going to be just noise. It takes a large amount of effort to simultaneously agree and add something to the original article. In contrast it's very easy to add value by pointing out any parts that are actually wrong, or by highlighting areas of disagreement since that's likely where the meat of the issue lies. (Of course there's going to be a threshold at which the value of pointing out errors is lower than the cost of the reply aggregated across all readers, such as pointing out insignificant typos or grammar mistakes).

Finally, I strongly disagree with this: "But pointing out all the places other people are wrong rarely teaches us anything". It probably doesn't teach anything to the person who disagrees, since they hopefully are already familiar with whatever issue they're disagree with. But it does teach something to others. And a place where people go to learn but nobody teaches sounds pretty miserable.

  > The cynical explanation for this is that people write negative comments to
  > show off how clever they are or how much they know. But I don’t think
  > that’s enough to explain how dedicated many commenters are to posting
  > negative feedback. Instead, I think people do it because they believe it’s
  > the right thing. Our cultural obsession with critical thinking compels us
  > to point out errors when we perceive them; errors are injustices that we
  > must right.

Most of the web falls into three categories: Trying to Get Page Views, Trying to Sell You Something, or Trying to Proselytize. Just looking at the front page of HN, many story titles are intentionally vague, if not inflamatory. Read any thread on reddit, and many comments try to filter or twist facts to support an opinion rather than make an insight. Whether you call it mediaspeak, doublespeak, or bulshytt, it is still an offensive tactic for attention at the cost of truth, and our cognitive capacity is a resource worth defending.

  > I think this in part explains why the Hacker School community is so much
  > more positive than the world at large: People come here firstly to learn
  > new things, not to dispute them. This suggests an interesting question:
  > Could you build a site like Hacker News with a community focused on
  > learning above all else?

Tangential Postscript: I would pay money for a news site like HN or /. that focused exclusively on news, information, and data. Nothing is worse than the almost-daily links we get from someone who thinks they know how to improve a business, technology, or process, but offers no hard data to back up their ideas or observations. Hypothesis is fine in comments, but I expect a bit more from articles.

Sigh.

I have no idea how big this Hacker School community is, but I imagine it is a good bit smaller than the traffic one sees on Hacker News. It is much, much, much easier to have a "positive" atmosphere when you have a community of under roughly 150 active members. I have seen stats that suggest that Internet forums typically have about 10% of the community very active and another 10% intermittently active and the rest lurkers. So, my experience has been that at around 700 members or so, you hit that roughly 150 mark of active members, above which you start seeing spin off communities, sub-communities and so on as some of the ways the community copes with having exceeded normal human bandwidth for community-making (based on the size of some brain part, etc).

This post strikes me as being written by someone who has zero appreciation for the sheer scale of Hacker News. It felt a LOT more like a real community when I initially joined it several years ago. In recent months, it seems to me it is a bit more female-friendly, and I suspect there are multiple reasons why it is evolving in that direction. So there are some good points and bad points, but it seems it has not managed to return to that same sense of community it once had.

The fact of the matter is that in all of human history, being able to bring together so very many people from such diverse backgrounds in real time is unprecedented. It should hardly shock people that this involves a high degree of friction and a fundamental need to invent new ways to interact, new cultural paradigms that have some hope of keeping things in that zone of warm sense of community. I think Hacker News is a victim of it's own success. It's sheer scale and level of traffic make this challenging. That doesn't mean it cannot be done. But that does mean it is kind of crappy to thump your own chest and brag about your pet theory as to why your undoubtedly much smaller community is running more smoothly at this time than Hacker News.

I strongly recommend you to watch Smile or Die, a talk by Barbara Ehrenreich.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo

The parallel with that is a delusion SOLD to the community. In the case of "hacker" school I criticize it as I did with the "MBA" program by Seth Godin. And I consider that I might be _completely_ wrong in both cases, but what is telling is how aggressive people got with me for speaking up my opinion.

"Bad news is good news. Good news is no news. No news is bad news."

Essentially, it means:

Bad news (criticism) done right will show you where you need to focus to improve. That's why we upvote those comments.

Good news will give you little or no actionable items to improve.

No news means you are not getting any feedback, which means your progress will stall.

[1] I worked (far) under Jim Moran when he was the long-time CEO of a huge hardware tech company: http://www.appliedmaterials.com/en-in/profiles/james-c-morga...

I agree.

>Indeed, Western culture trains us to disagree as part of learning to be critical thinkers.

I disagree.

I don't think Western culture teaches critical thinking at all. My wife just took a Critical Thinking course at college. I never took such a thing in all my years of schooling. The key to Critical Thinking, if anything, is to develop in oneself the ability to not react automatically, and to start from a position of no-bias.

On the other hand, any child who has ever sat in a Western class room knows that many teachers (for some children, all their teachers) "teach" by asking students a question and then telling them they are wrong.

I think the fundamental problem, however, is fantasy vs reality. I find I do this with my development team: I have this idea in my head of what the product should look like; I ineffectively deliver this vision to my team; the team delivers (well) on this ineffective vision; I berate them for what is wrong with it. I, in my role as teacher, perpetuate the awful process, by teaching it to my team as I learned it from my teachers.

It is hard to turn fantasies into reality through communication. We have learned to solve this through "trial and error", with an emphasis on "error".

Perhaps changing the conversation from, "This sucks! This isn't at all what I wanted!" to "This is great! Now how about if it does this...!"

The idea that we are critical because "it’s so much easier to challenge other people’s thinking than our own" is hard to take. If anything, this speaks to a failure to be self-critical more than a surplus of outward negativity.

More generally, I'm frustrated by what I see as an increasing tendency of people to parse the world into "positive" and "negative". This by itself speaks to a lack of truly critical thinking.

Further, I believe that the idea that critically taking apart other ideas is somehow a fundamentally distinct activity from developing one's own ideas is incorrect. In mathematics you develop ideas precisely by searching for what might be unsatisfying in the arguments and theories of others. And most successful start-ups seem to have some roots in looking at how what others are doing is sub-optimal.

I used to take a lot of pride in 'critical' thought. Certainly I frequently take this attitude toward the things floating around in my head, and I like that.

But I've learned not to do the same for ideas from others, especially in short comments on the internet, where it's basically a given that the other didn't fully express themselves anyway.

'critical' thought isn't all there is. 'constructive' thought is important too; maybe even more important. It's easy to be a critic and find 10 things wrong with another idea. It's harder, riskier, but more rewarding to then prioritize which of those 10 things should be worked out first and in what way.

If someone throws out a half baked idea. You can critique it. Most people stop there. But you can also continue forward and construct on top of it, propose changes, make it better.

I now try now to be not just critical but constructive in most parts of my life.

As a society, on the other hand, negative comments are indispensible for maintaining a balanced conversation, protecting human rights, and generally improving the state of our civilization.

> Western culture trains us to disagree as part of learning to be critical thinkers.

And that's one of the most important reasons why liberal democracy has such a hard time taking root in other cultures.

In (idealized) Western courtrooms, it's the job of each attorney to try to tear apart every single thing that the other attorney says. It's unpleasant, of course. It often wastes time and resources. But it's the only way we've found so far to make sure that the process as a whole reaches a balanced conclusion. It's our worst solution except all the others.

Like the market economy, the power of this process comes from the fact that it harnesses the power of human selfishness for the greater good. Really, it's genius. The system is not only fault-tolerant (where "fault" means moral fault), it actually thrives on the faults of its participants.

A society that treats negative comments as a taboo will stagnate and go corrupt. Because you can't eliminate selfishness, cynicism, and blind spots from human nature. To pretend that such traits don't exist, or even worse, to try to suppress them, is bound to fail. (Yeah, we tried that with human sexuality.) The only solution is to acknowledge that we are often selfish, cynical, and partially blind, and to channel that energy into productive use.

> writing negative comments feels good: It exercises our critical thinking skills without challenging anything we hold dear ... pointing out all the places other people are wrong rarely teaches us anything.

Exactly. And when I do that, it's YOUR job to challenge what I hold dear by exercising your critical thinking skills. At the end of the day, we can both learn! The more we do this to one another, the better it will be for all of us. Learning by criticism is not an individual task, it's a social project.

Of course, some people can't handle this. Ever been to DeviantArt? Everybody there praises everyone else's work all the time, no matter how shitty it is. Given the delicate sensibilities of a certain demographic that frequents DeviantArt, this policy probably saves lives. But should we all act like emo teenagers just because some of us behave like emo teenagers?

How do you decide which are which?

HN doesn't really have a problem with vacuous comments like "this is great" or "this is shit" which are equally as bad as each other since they add nothing of value. Those get downvoted. Commenters shouldn't be putting people down without saying anything constructive, but it's not our job to bolster anyone's ego with boundless support and positivity either.

The main purpose of comments is to provide criticism, or point out things that are similar that others might be interested in as a follow-up on a good article.

As a result that's going to come across as either negative (picking holes, focusing on what's wrong - since that's what criticism mainly consists of), or derisory (this isn't new, here's a bunch of similar stuff). In both cases there may not be any intention of malice or even a negative tone to the comment, but unless the author sugar-coats everything by adding weasel phrases like "this is awesome but...", it's going to come across as negative by default.

Comments can also contain questions, which can often read as criticism/negativity. E.g. "why does this exist when there is already Foo?". How one chooses to interpret comments like these is up to the reader. I find it's best to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to poor communication.

It's always nice to see or be able to comment along the lines of "this is awesome and here's why it's awesome" in a way that the explanation adds some value. But usually it's just redundant fluff and more ego stroking.

The reason these comments are less common isn't because western culture is broken, the education system is broken, or because the illuminati wants to oppress us by keeping us all demotivated. It's just because the opportunity for insightful, positive comments is much rarer than the opportunity for insightful, negative comments.

Positivity is nice and all, but I'd rather have zero comments than waste my time reading dozens of "this is great" me-too comments. Insightfulness is a million times more important than positivity.

It's not about people showing off how clever they are, it's about commenters doing what commenters are supposed to do: provide commentary and criticism that adds value. If you want to immerse yourself in positive comments, there are plenty of Reddit circlejerks that do just that. HN is not that. If you think HN is negative, try reading Slashdot for a month instead. You'll appreciate just how good HN comments really are when you come back.

The system works. Mostly.

I actually find the "negative" comments refreshing on YC. Youtube comments are the bane of existence...