Comment by Peroni

There's a reason those kinds of posts are considered off-topic here. Polarized subjects quickly get ugly and toxic, people tend to turn off their brains and just react rather than trying to understand the other perspective. It's a shame, I enjoy discussing those topics, especially with people I disagree with. But it's almost impossible on the internet.

I find the most emotionally negative content on HN is about public education. There are so many people who were personally affected by poor schooling in their youth and cannot resist to add their (usually unhelpful and uninsightful) two cents to the discussion. So many of these negative comments are paint with a very broad brush, like: "Public schools are terrible in state X." It is so general as to be useless.

Years ago, when I was young, I noticed a trend watching local TV news: Whenever they would interview people on the street, past a certain age, their comments become so much more negative. Example: "So, how is traffic in your part of town? Oh, it's never been worse." "How are the public schools? Oh, it's never been worse." Ad nauseam. Whenever I feel any conversation in my life is drifting into "Oh, it's never been worse.", I tune out.

It bugs me but also it comes with the territory - HN attracts an awful lot of programmers, and most programmers skew hard to pedantry (more specifically, noticing and correcting minute details). I'd love the exact same community minus the pedantry, but if losing the pedantry costs the programmers, but am not sure how possible that is (without more sophisticated moderation).

I simply choose to believe that people do this out of a place of genuine curiosity / excitement to share knowledge. I believe this approach of assuming the best of intentions is even in the HN guidelines! Or maybe it was just the old Reddit ones from long long ago when Reddit was more like what HN is now. Either way, maintaining the background assumption, even when it is challenging to do so, makes HN a far more pleasant place to inhabit.

I do run into the overly pedantic stuff pretty frequently, people will often latch on to some minor point or detail, maybe because it's easier to comment on?

Deep technical critique often can't be in the comments, in my opinion. Unless you're an expert, setting up the environment, doing the experiments and presenting the data is an entire article on it's own. It would probably be healthier if people did that, rather than typing out a quick comment.

Then there are topics like how AI will influence society in general, that's a multi-year sociology study, before being able to say anything with just a hint of accuracy. Warnings based on sentiment and anecdotes will always register as negative.

There are some articles that have 200+ comments, in those cases whatever you have to say has probably already been posted, but people like to vent their frustrations, sometimes it helps to type out your thoughts, even if no one will read them.

The classifiers I used are definitely conflating technical criticism with genuine negativity, and that's a real limitation. When I say "technical critique reads differently than personal attacks," I probably should have been clearer that the models aren't making that distinction well.

Compared to how bad online discourse has gotten pretty much anywhere else in the meantime, it's still really good here. Only place I can stomach for extended periods

This is SUCH a good example of pedantry and will become my new primary example. All too often, people think of pedantry as being along the magnitude of scale. The "rational" pedant's response to this is to use quantitative jargon and bayes to scale up the size of the nitpick.

So you're arguing that technically the technical critique is not valuable by yourself arguing on technicalities of the technical critique. Oh the irony! But you're not wrong. ;)

Technically speaking, it's not a reflection, it's Rayleigh scattering. So you're wrong, even the majority of the time! :)

This remains the best general description imo:

> The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness. Ill-advised citations proliferate; thought experiments abound; humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational. Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral positions. The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns.

From the new yorker's profile of dang a few years ago. It doesn't specifically address the negativity but it contains it, if you get what I mean.

Also I mean you know you, personally, are one of the worst about this right? I only recognize a handful of usernames here and yours is one for exactly this reason.

It‘s worthwhile to mention „clones“ because Mastodon/Fediverse and bsky turned into the same negativity sinkholes just with a different group. Builders and creators quickly became the minority, as it happend on Twitter within 3-4 years after launch.

Exactly the kind of standard I love to hold myself to. :D