Comment by armchairhacker

Unfortunately I have to say that honestly some of the comments on HN are way more well-thought-out, insightful, important, etc. than the article. Sometimes the article is written by someone who doesn’t really understand what they’re writing about, and the 10-second comment is written by an expert in their field.

IMO there are 2 types of “negative” comments:

- Constructive criticism: if you don’t like this, don’t read it. But personally I really want constructive criticism for whatever I post. HN is good because commenters give everyone constructive criticism, they won’t “beat around the bush” and even if your post is 99% good, they’ll focus on the 1% bad part. This is really good to the writer, as constructive criticism is how you improve.

It’s also really good for commenters, especially if the article is promotional (which many are). Nothing wrong with promoting something but I want to see the benefits and drawbacks. In fact, hearing honest flaws in a product from HN commenters sometimes increases its value, because I know where it falls short and where it doesn’t, vs. having to guess the flaws myself (which I tend to overestimate, having seen too much BS).

- Non-constructive criticism aka “mean” criticism. I agree with the author and I’d like to see this go away or be downvoted. Unfortunately HN does have a lot of mean criticism, even some of the most highly-upvoted comments are mean. This includes: criticism of the author, criticism of something unrelated, criticism which doesn’t offer solutions or justification (e.g. “this sucks”), pointing out some hard-to-fix flaw while completely ignoring why the flaw is hard or impossible to fix (e.g. criticizing a company from doing something when they legally have to, without even mentioning how the company could satisfy the law another way - e.g. criticizing GitHub for taking down repos with genuine DMCA violations). Overall, any criticism which the author can’t improve from, especially criticism which uses particularly harsh words.

I really have to emphasize the last part. Nobody should ever be saying “X sucks”, “X is garbage”, “X is a failure”, “X is completely useless” towards a post or it’s author. It’s way too unnecessarily harsh and no solution, you’re not helping someone improve with these words, you’re just putting them down. And nobody should ever tell someone to “die in a fire” or “jump in front of a bus”, but I occasionally hear those things even on HN. These types of comments should be flagged, they just shouldn’t exist.

But the constructive criticism, that is a very good thing. It helps remove bias which is so prevalent in this world. And there are many cases where it actually caused the author or company to fix a big flaw, which didn’t just not exist when people didn’t mention it.

The author is fine not reading HN comments to avoid reading criticism. Nobody should be forced to themselves read harsh feedback if they don’t want it. But personally, I really think it’s essential to HN I don’t want to ever see it go away.