Comment by dang
1 year ago
This is the kind of comment that the newest HN guideline is designed to discourage:
"Don't be curmudgeonly." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What counts as being curmudgeonly? Here's one heuristic: if a comment is flying close to the planet "Everything is worse than it used to be," then it probably is.
There's also this one, btw: "Please don't fulminate." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Well, that one's news to me, thanks for pointing it out. Huh. I feel... mildly targeted, actually! We only want positive thoughts now, I guess.
I changed my mind. The speech is great. New graduates should totally listen to it and follow it's extremely relevant advice.
> We only want positive thoughts now, I guess.
Not so! Check out the next sentence: "Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm sorry you felt targeted and promise you it's nothing personal. It's that we're trying for curious conversation, which the rigid-and-generic sort of negativity annihilates. There's not much room for curious response when a comment insists that the world is nothing but a "dog eat dog slugfest".
Btw, I believe that the deeper problem is that it's hard to tell how one's comments are going to come across. Most people underestimate the negativity they're contributing by a good 10x or so, which leads to quite a skew in perception. That could explain, for example, why you felt like I must be telling you to only do happytalk.
OK. The tribe has spoken. No more gloom and doom. I suppose there are other message boards for that. I appreciate the intentional and purposeful moderation here, even if I sometimes strongly disagree with the intent behind it.
1 reply →