The depressing thing is how some forums like StackOverflow actually ban "thank you" comments. It makes the world a more heartless place.
Downside is that there is still some cost to it, like writing "please" and "thank you" to LLM...
Negative bias is probably inevitable in cognition itself.
Real discourse tends to be critical. If you want sloppy trade press, read Apple Insider or Business Insider, or maybe watch a slop tech creator like Linus Tech Tips.
But that 35 as an average score is hard for me to believe at first, I mean, the median HN post gets no votes, last time I looked the mean was around 8 or so. What is he sampling from?
[1] comments/votes = 0.5 is close to the mean
In addition, comments do not show the points accumulated so there’s no way you can know how many points a comment gets, only posts.
To clarify on the second point: I am not analyzing individual comment scores (which, as you noted, are hidden). The metric refers to post points relative to comment growth/volume. I will be updating the methodology section to reflect these limitations. The full code and dataset will be open-sourced with the final publication so the sampling can be fully audited. Appreciate the rigor.
Where does this come from? Please quote where he said "negative" means "bad".
This is extremely funny, and reminds me of the famous newspaper headline "Generalissimo Francisco Franco Is Still Dead". Of course, at time of writing, RMS is still alive and the optimal headline is a falsehood..
I bet if it was put in as "fake news" it would get hundreds of votes and comments before dang took it down. And when it does happen for real it will certainly get 1000s votes.
That's where Betteridge's law of headlines comes to the rescue! Just rephrase the headline as a question - "Is Richard Stallman dead?".
When I helped write
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0308253100
in 2004 I thought text classification was a remarkably mature technology which was under-used. In particularly I thought there was no imagination in RSS reader interfaces and thought an RSS reader with an algorithmic feed. That December when Musk bought Twitter this was still on my mind and I made it happen and the result was the YOShInOn RSS reader [1] and I thought building it around a workflow where I select articles for my own interest and post some on HN was a good north star. [2]
It is self tuning and soldiers on despite changes in the input and how much time I vote to it. It spins like a top and I've only patched it twice in the last year.
Anything that gets posted to HN is selected once by the algorithm and twice by me. Reducing latency is a real goal, improving quality is a hypothetical goal, either of those involves some deep thinking about "what does quality mean?" and threatens the self tuning and "spins like a top".
My interest in it is flagging lately because of new projects I am working on, I am worried though that if I quit doing it people will wonder if something happened to me because that happened when Tomte went dark.
(2) I'll argue that scientific papers are better and worse than you say they are. Sometimes an abstract or an image tells a good story story, arguably a paper shouldn't get published. I think effective selection and ranking processes are a pyramid and I am happy to have the HN community make the decision about things. On the other hand, I've spent 6 months (not full time) wrangling with a paper and then come back 6 years later and come to see I got it wrong the first time.
I worked at arXiv a long time ago and we talked a lot about bibliometrics and other ways to judge the quality of scientific work and the clearest thing is that it would take a long time like not 4-5 hours of an individual but more like several years (maybe decades!) of many, many people working at it -- consider the example of the Higgs Boson!
Many of the papers that I post were found in the RSS feed of phys.org, if they weren't working overtime to annoy people with annoying ads I would post more links to phys.org and less to papers. I do respect the selection effort they make and often they rewrite the title "We measured something with" to "Scientists discovered something important" and sometimes they explain papers well but unfortunately "voice" won't get them to reform their self-destructive advertising.
I could ramble on a lot more and I really ought to write this up somewhere off HN but I will just open the floor to questions if you have any.
[1] search for it in the box at the bottom of the page
[2] pay attention if you struggle to complete side projects!
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to deliver this message, you've been indispensable to its creation.
As an ESL person one of the first internet-related terms I learned was "flamewar".
EDIT: ESL -> English as a Second Language
PS: I learned that acronym less than a year ago, so maybe it is not as used as I thought.
Feel like there is an "S" word that works
This is the third link off the HN Front Page that yields the following error in Firefox:
Websites prove their identity via certificates. Firefox does not trust this site because it uses a certificate that is not valid for philippdubach.com. The certificate is only valid for the following names: cloudflare-ech.com, *.cloudflare-ech.com
Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): 0.5 s Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): 0.01 First Contentful Paint (FCP): 0.5 s Time to First Byte (TTFB): 0.3 s
Also not on the Clodflare Dashboard. If the issue persists could you please send me the error message and console output. Thanks!
> It's human nature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias. Everyone does it, but we perceive other people as doing it more than we do, which is itself a variation of the bias. You can even see it in the title of the OP, in the word "overwhelmingly". That's excessive: the negative bias is noticeable, but if you look closely, it's not overwhelming. (To make up some numbers, it's more like 60-40, not 90-10.)
However, it often feels as if it is overwhelming; in fact, one or two datapoints, plus negativity bias, are enough to create just such a feeling. The feeling gets expressed in ways that trigger similar feelings in other people, so we end up with a positive* feedback loop.
The interesting question is, what factors mitigate this? how do we dampen negativity bias? or, how do we get negative feedback into our positive feedback loop of negative affect? That must also be happening all the time, or we'd be in a "war of all against all", which isn't the case, though (again) it may feel like it.
* ['positive' in the sense of increasing; a positive loop of negative affect!]
Note that for humans and other social animals "survival" doesn't always mean life or death -- it can mean being included or excluded from a social group which indirectly affects survival chances.
But posting something positive and getting slammed in the comments? That's depressing. So the barrier to posting something positive seems higher.
This is addressed in OPs post. The vast majority of the 'negativity' I encounter on HN is technical critique rather than criticism or toxicity. I've found HN to arguably be one of the least toxic communities.
“The sky is blue.”
“Technically speaking, no; it’s just a reflection, and at night it’s basically black, so you’re wrong even the majority of the time!”
As such I still completely back that article years ago calling this place lovably toxic. It’s gotten worse since then.
This place drowns in veiled toxicity.
“Grass is green”
“But I live in California and we have a drought, and the entire concept of green grass is a waste of valuable water resources, and was frankly always a sign of privilege because only someone with excess freshwater can do it, and we need that freshwater for starving kids in Africa, and if Boomers hadn’t been so obsessed with single family housing and urban sprawl…”
I don't really disagree but given the massive tsunami of outright _vileness_ that has engulfed all other online soaces it's holding up remarkably well
> 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.
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.
I am active on Mastodon, Bluesky, and Tumblr but not X. On all of those platforms I am selective about who I follow (e.g. said anything about Trump in the last 20 posts I won't follow you, posted an image with angry text in it, I won't follow you) and quick with the block button. In the case of the first two I get a feed which is really cozy, the third has way too much AI slop (fake cat videos!) which would get the smackdown on the other too.
I really enjoy sharing photos on that kind of platform as well as the kind of links I post to HN. I did have an image that was a breakout hit the other day which got me a burst of follows and it was really depressing that 95%-ish of those new followers are people who are apoplectic about #uspol. There are just so many of those people and they post so much and they always say the same things and I find it emotionally contagious.
I am bothered less by the right wing equivalent of those people because I don't go on X, I live in one of the most liberal towns in America. They bother me less because I can easily dismiss the people who are bleating "free speech", "free speech", "freespeech" as NPC minions of Peter Thiel [1] whereas I agree with the followers of Heather Cox Richardson about the problem but think their solution is so wrong and actually destructive to their cause that they are effectively working for the Koch Organization for free and for me that stings.
[1] ... although I know I shouldn't.
2. Ignore the cultists of all sides, ignore the people who fall into every rage bait trap or just want to start a cult. Almost nobody is right or wrong all the time except people who outright hate all people and have no empathy.
3. Even when you follow a person, treat them with a big grain of salt. Everyone is an influencer, many have some underlying agenda or questionable views. Be reluctant to share, be reluctant of trusting in topics people are not known for. Your three letter guy sure knows A LOT about code, business and getting things done, however his view on politics may be dubious. You need to be able to accept that both at the same time.
BTW even being the least toxic leaves the bar still pretty low, if you ask me.
Who is the forum exactly?
>But it's currently designed for mass-appeal and engagement.
Are you talking about hacker news? Your description confuses me in relation to the site you are on.
I'd like to see you expand on how one would remove the artificial limitations without massively increasing the administrative/moderative workload.
First of all, there are famously no real sub-sections of HN, it's just this one "home page" with 30 "stories" that are voted on by 5 million people (unique monthly viewers), and a couple other ways to sort or view the same stories based on some algorithm. So it's nearly impossible to have discussions here unless it falls into a very broad category. Therefore the discussions are broad, the opinions are broad, the reactions are broad. You have a lot of people talking past each other, arguing over nothing, reinforcing false beliefs, etc.
Second, like Reddit and its other "story-specific discussion" brethren, there is no ongoing conversation, like older forums, so all discourse has to be topical, temporary, and based around a specific piece of media and set of positions. People get trapped in debates over false premises, presented bad information, and can't reference other discussions or pick up where one left off. There is no memory or continuous conversation, so every new story is nearly random in what will be discussed, what opinions will become dominant, what group rides in to take over the thread.
Third, the site is filled with algorithms to filter, optimize, weight, and otherwise alter what content shows up on the front page. It is a highly curated, highly artificial environment, serving the purposes of YC to gather users with which to funnel potential founders into its startup machine. This is a business and we are the product, and we are being honed and shaped according to a very particular set of interests, priorities, goals. A sort of 'ideal world' according to a very small number of people.
Fourth, there's as many moderators for all of HN as there is for the average Subreddit, yet 10x as many users here. It would be trivial to simply acquire more volunteer moderators. But I believe they want to keep tight control on moderation in order to ensure they shape narratives, behaviors and culture in a specific way.
Fifth, the technology of the user interface hasn't advanced past what was available in the 90's. Besides the lack of topics/categories, tags, customization of the feed, and no way to provide feedback other than up/down vote. This is intentional in order to force the culture YC wants. But it makes it difficult to have more nuanced discussions. For example, the "up/down" vote button could easily expand to more specific reactions, ala Slashdot's moderation modifiers (Troll, Flamebait, Offtopic, Redundant, Overrated, Underrated, Funny, Informative, Interesting, Insightful, Normal). Going further, votes could have emotional modifiers (Angry, Scared, Confused, Excited) and intellectual modifiers (Incorrect, Misleading, Stupid, Correct, Factual, Agreed). The addition of this intellectual and emotional context would allow users to provide more feedback to the comments they're voting on, which helps guide users in their discourse as well as shape the culture towards more intelligent discourse. But without these signals, there is no way to divine what an upvote or downvote means, so it becomes an incredibly poor signal. The only way to know if a story is a shit-show or not is to compare total upvotes to total comments, as a majority of comments indicates a lot of emotional, uneducated people trying to force their opinion on everyone else.
This could be improved if those people could provide more context to their feedback, or the discussion continued past the initial story in a more nuanced way. But there is no way to solve this as every single story is another battle that everyone feels like they have to fight over again, because ground is never won, nuance never captured, education impossible. This forum is designed to force people to come back to reassert whatever they already believe, or argue to perpetuate it, which keeps engagement high.
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.
Constructive criticism isn't toxic and is incredibly valuable.
Has happened in two other same type situations. Find it super territorial and toxic TBH.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/002210...
Both to have gotten in there, and to keep going.
Like anything, it's a balancing act. Being optimistic the IRS isn't going to throw you in jail for not paying your taxes, after all, has a so-so track record. But not zero!
It's very important to filter out bad ideas.
To be frank, a large portion of HNers just aren't qualified for that and never will be, and a growing proportion exhibit bot-like behavior. The fact that a bot account for "The Register" operated undetected on HN for 3 years and accumulated 66k karma until I and one other commenter decided to call it out highlights issues with this community.
I personally think stricter moderation of tone (maybe in an automated manner), a stricter delineation on the kinds of topics being posted to HN, and a complete overhaul of the now 17 year old HN guidelines is now in order.
HN used to be a platform where ICs and decisionmakers could anonymously have a water cooler conversation or a discussion but leave with changed impression. Over the past few years, it has exhibited hallmarks of becoming a more combative forum with users exhibiting Reddit-like behavior and oftentimes sharing articles from a handful of Reddit subs. Without a significant revamp, HN will lose it's signal-to-noise ratio which differentiated it.
Already, most YC founders prefer to use BookFace over HN and more experienced technical ICs are looking to lobsters.
Pace could be driven by the rapidity with which posts fall off the front page or with which comments expand so new comments are far down the list.
I'd turn that around and say the observation that negative comments are upvoted shows that HN readers value them.
I'll admit we could use more steelmanning when critiquing.
That being said, pessimism/optimism is a false dichotomy. The reason is that both are willful attitudes of expectation on an emotional spectrum rather than rationally grounded and sober assessments of reality. The wise path is prudent (I don't mean "cautious"; I mean the classic virtue [0]). Prudence is rational. You can't be better than rational (genuinely rational; believing you are rational is not the same as being rational).
Could you clarify what do you mean by "points" ("score" in your pre-print)?
Also, what's your data source?
"This study uses publicly available data from Hacker News." is not really a data source.
Also also, you missed the largest, most important effect that skews the votes on this site. But you can definitely find it on the dataset you got, that'd be a very interesting disclosure!
Hint: Immediately after posting this comment, it went to the bottom and "downvotes" magically started to come in ;).
Btw, excellent work!
Not that karam matters on HN but I have been disappointed to see longer comments that I put a lot of effort into get ignored while short, pithy comments get way more upvotes/replies. I've spent literally over an hour on some detailed comments that didn't even get a reply from the original person asking a question and likewise had comments I fired off with near-0 thought that "blow up". It's frustrating that better content is not always rewarded.
[0] Something I'm guilty of
Most of my longer comments start as a single sentence that I feel is too ambiguous or leave too much room for misunderstandings and so they grow from there.
Something I’ve been experimenting with here is writing smaller comments that serve as an invitation for someone to write an equally lengthy or longer comment in reply.
If the accept the implicit invitation then we can have a longer conversation. It has had moderate success.
It could be. Maybe we just fail to create better content, despite the effort put in. Maybe your frustration comes from lack of engagement, maybe your effort was lost in the ether and no one noticed... But getting noticed could be one criteria to evaluate how good content is. You perform better while not creating the content you consider better. Or captivating an audience to appreciate the better. You see, they don't.
Do you have a blog? It sounds like you would enjoy that.
Ty for the blog reference, will check it for sure.
I'm recalibrating my own behavior to upvote more.
Is it the desired behavior of HN that silent upvotes are for agreement? (Instead of a positive comment that doesn't add substantially to the discourse?)
Though interestingly that's largely due to a few specific comments 'blowing up' -- it's typically either 0 upvotes or 100+. I believe the median is actually lower despite a significantly higher average.
One is: HN does not like jokes, unless you put an explanation in the comment as well.
That said, I haven't done sentiment analysis on those or more recent comments but my guess is that "negative" comments get more upvotes
BTW, this comment is supposed to be joke-ish.
Informative content gives people social license to approve of the comment. HN users intuit on some level that jokes are against the cultural norms; but being serious all the time in an open round-table environment almost goes against human nature.
My interpretation is that this is at least partially what flags are for. A comment that is clearly seeking to be amusing while also arguing a position, that would be clearly unfunny to someone who disagrees, is needlessly fanning the flames.
> I have been disappointed to see longer comments that I put a lot of effort into get ignored while short, pithy comments get way more upvotes/replies
I share the frustration. But publishing content on the Internet seems to be more or less universally like that.
My usual journey: I visit the comment section and then look for the first top comment that criticizes the core thesis of the article.
There are plenty of articles or news ive red that made me think "that's pretty clever" only for HN to point out background i missed and tradeoffs making a solution worse.
Sometimes criticism is shallow or pedantic, but thats easy to dismiss if irrelevant.
We're naturally wired to engage with negative content - and that's a must-use recipe for success in an economy that increasingly relies on grabbing your attention.
It's no wonder that depression and anxiety rates are higher than ever, despite our world being much, much safer than it was 100-200 years ago.
Even being aware of this doesn't help all that much.
Trump did a new, unbelievably dumb thing that's going to ruin people's lives? Instant click from me.
Malaria rates down 20% over the past 10 years in the DRC?* I'm still scrolling.
*Fake example, but you get the gist.
Thus comments are mostly neutral, objective facts that add upon the original comment, or negative comments of disagreement.
Not a panacea, and I'd be interested to hear others ideas on how to better comment and give feedback.
Wisdom is in knowing what to do which works, which is finite. Wasting knowledge space on the infinite ways to be wrong is not nearly as helpful as it may seem.
Furthermore, there should be a difference between a contradictory viewpoint and something that is truly negative.
Did HN get overrun by trolls, shills, and bots? Or did I just get more cranky?
Old platforms always end up having problems with the users capable of making positive contributions only having so much time in the day to post, whereas the incorrigible and insane are usually unemployed or use the site compulsively at work, so they end up being overrepresented and stick around for longer.
In the past I saw a lot more of these users get flagged and lose interest in the site, but recently it seems as though more users are vouching for the flagged comments and submissions.
This makes me recall a conversation from a podcast with Sam Harris where he discusses the “pornography of doubt”
Here is the YouTube clip, less than a minute long
I use to subscribe to waking up app and really enjoyed the enlightening discussions with other intellectuals in different domains of biology, psychology and science.
Americans are increasingly unhappy, and they're not willing to do what it takes to be happy. Quite the opposite really.
It's not just the internet.
In other words, if 35% of hn content is positive (or neutral?), compared to reddit and most mainstream social media, it's actually very positive!
Edit: I found the list of blocked subreddits if anyone is curious to see:
https://hlnet.neocities.org/RIF_filters_categorized.txt
Note that it also includes stuff I wasn't interested in at the time, like anime, and only has subreddits up until I quit, around the API ban.
To meta-steelman: if one steelmans a bad take, then the negativity becomes even more valuable.
I'm as guilty of negativity as anybody, maybe even more than most, but at least we can recognize this as a vice which may feel good in the short term but do us harm in the long run.
harm??? so only happy thoughts from now on?
It's hard to let bad ideas go unchallenged though. Places like Reddit? Sure, brigades, bots—it's tilting at windmills to try to add balance there. But HN is a community I still care for. I still respect the comments (and commenters) here.
(No, commentator is not a word—despite what Apple's dictionary is telling me.)
(See also: commentariat)
It is 100% how adults approach life.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3652533/
>Most bad ideas aren't really worth arguing about,
At the same time you have to stop bad ideas in their tracks otherwise they spread like bacteria on an unclean counter, and the internet typically does a bad job of stopping them unless moderation is heavy handed. This leads to a never ending circle of discussion of bad ideas.
Bad ideas in fields of expertise need to be discussed to the extent of keeping the field free of bad ideas as much as possible. Biologists will sometimes point out why intelligent design is not a good scientific theory for example.
We can rigorously test an idea or decide it’s not for us while still maintaining a supportive environment.
Often, the most helpful feedback isn't ‘this is bad,’ but rather ‘here is a different perspective to consider.’
Reading online, listing to public discourse, etc. these days is like taking the Tide Pod challenge; people feeding you inedible or even toxic garbage that superficially looks like candy. If we fed others actual food with the same care we employ when producing "food for thought", we'd all be, at best, very, very ill.
When compared with what people wrote in the past (especially through a survivorship bias filter, where the best writing is preserved longer and distributed more widely) what we produce today seems crude and disgusting.
Even stranger, for me, is the current prevalence of collective shunning, the so called cancel-culture, that is triggered by the most diverse reasons, but seemingly never buy the negativity and toxicity of the discourse. It is always lone individuals leaving because of that. But as soon as another reason - political, cultural etc. — is added, there is a collective exodus and condemnation. twitter/x is good example.
I did something similar and ended up opening only /r/AskHistorian posts...
I was blocking subreddits recently and was contemplating if /r/historyporn because of the amount of photos of dead bodies and politically-charged discussions that sometimes unfold
Reddit (or socially generated sites) are really a mixed bag.
For the most part I pinned it down to casual engagement from non hobbyists introduced noise and anti information at scale.
For example in r/cars a site that talks about vehicles the vast majority of commenters do not own, comments become about the “simualacra” of having an exotic (comparing specs debating reviews etc). Where as Ferrari chat forum is about the utilitarian ins and outs of actually owning one (financing, maintence, dealer issues etc).
This seems to apply to all hobby forums when grow in popularity to the point where engagement rewards contributions from non hobbiests over real ones.
My final takeaway was that the nature of the internet being a simulation inherently rewards non real content over real. (Fake news is inherent to the internet) And karmic systems specifically reconstruct and enforce that simualacra.
I recently bought a pair of boots from a reputable brand. So I of course checked out the subreddit for the brand and while many posts are good and the community is receptive to questions but posts by weirdos with like a dozen+ pairs of $300+ boots dominate the discussion.
Can these people actually afford like $5000 worth of boots and all the accessories they come with it? Maybe. Maybe we’re all participating in their shopping addiction when they post pictures of their stairs covered in boots.
Either way there’s something unsettlingly unnatural about their posts, and I don’t mean in an astroturfing sort of way.
the mentally ill are, well, mentally ill after all.
The person is buying the 10th boot because of the feeling they get showing it off and getting karma on the forums.
This is crazy represented in watch forums where broadly in the real world no one cares an iota about watches but inside the forums it becomes insanity.
>also revealed how boring it is without the kind of algorithmic reaction seeking content.
I also found this but realized this is a good thing(!) if your goal is to reduce Reddit usage.
That being said, a little negativity might be warranted in order to be a part of the discussion. Otherwise you're just opting out completely.
I always bring the same example: if one of your best friends has troubles with it's partner you'll hear for hours. But when things go smooth they have nothing to say and you have little to add.
Engagement means money. Even if this is bait content then you get rewarded (on TikTok, X, YouTube, you directly get cash).
Even here controversy is indirectly rewarded here because it creates engagement, and there is practically no downsides if you upset anyone;
You get points for every answer that someone does to your comment, and the downvotes you get on your own comments don't offset the gained points.
These points have real utility to make money indirectly: the more points you have, the more credibility you have on this platform and capacity to push a story.
[...]
and it helps to bootstrap your project or grab new customers for free (at most 1 day of writing the bot script).
Let's say, you want to launch a new Juicero, and nobody knows about it yet, it's great to be able to push it on the homepage of HN, otherwise nobody is going to notice.
Meanwhile if you say anything bad about capitalism the comment is removed.
I would tend to think that this goes naturally:
you get boosted by a circle of people you know, and who wants you to succeed, because if you succeed they will get money), so there is the incentive in some way.
but it's still plausible that getting a boost on HN is part of the package (but I am not sure it is needed, because of this natural push that you get from let's say 100 people around you).
What you said about capitalism is true, I noticed it too, and it sounds even strange to me, as we are literally on a board that is initiated by a capitalist fund.
The HN culture used to be almost exclusively a ton of nerds thinking that tech and the free market would be the answer for everything - but the last few years have served as a brutal, but very effective reality check for a lot of people.
Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much of a good side to it all. Work from home maybe?
It’s back a ton of progress on many fronts. Counter examples welcomed.
IMO it's more the HN userbase has expanded, a lot, and now includes a lot of people who aren't the same tech enthusiasts the site had historically. Yeah, I know, eternal September and all that, but to put it into perspective: Trump's first election victory got 2215 comments[0], his second election victory got 9275 comments[1]. There are some mitigating factors here--iirc HN was having downtime issues due to the traffic in 2016--but HN was already pretty popular among tech enthusiasts 9 years ago, and it's grown 400% from that!
I'm sure some people have changed their minds, but any shifts (perceived or real) in politics on HN are more likely due to changes in the userbase over time, IMO.
"Eternal September" explains (correctly IMHO) why there are more people of a different background, but more people doesn't explain why it is very noticeable that downvotes and deathflags don't happen as frequently as before.
If that is an example for how your usual comments look like, I can assure you it has nothing to do with whether you criticize capitalism or not. A low-effort single-sentence mood statement is just not a good fit for the site.
I'm trying to establish, if you'll believe me, that I'm not whoring.
And yet, I confess to generally towing the cynical line in my comments. But that's my nature. "Atta boy", piling on, bandwagoning—antithetical to my nature. In fact I'm always suspicious when a thing appears to have no downside.
I can say too at times, I'll take a stand in opposition to what I actually believe in order to call myself out—or, you know, cast doubt. I suspect ego comes in to play too—it's kind of a challenge to take the unpopular opinion and champion it.
In short, I think if I generally agree with the sentiment in the thread, I don't comment.
At the end, just saying that the best way to increase engagement is to increase bait / rage. Ironically that increases retention on the platforms too, so they don't need peace, if there are juicy flame wars.
I'm okay with that.
<1: Troll
<10: Throwaway
<60: Troll
<300: Probably a throwaway. Quality varies widely.
>500, <1000: Normal people
>1000, account less than 6 months old: Redditor, all content will be political or occasionally about Linux, most comments will be inflammatory.
<1000, >10,000, account less than 5 years old: Mostly normal users. Quality isn’t generally great.
<10,000, >30,000, account 10+ years old: Usually the best quality posts; karma and age suggest consistent contributions overtime without any of the personality disorders that go with being terminally online.
>100,000, account <5 years old: Redditor, all content will be political or occasionally about Linux, most comments will be inflammatory. Lots of flagged submissions about US politics.
>100,000, 10+ years old: Domain knowledge expert. Usually an older user with enough of a reputation that a subset of users know the user’s real identity. Will occasionally post absolutely unhinged comments.
The absolute key feature is the domain experts, not the karma. Any time any subject comes up, someone appears that knows everything about the subject and lives in the field. It’s the single best thing about HN by a million miles.
I remember a guy that had millions just because on any reddit AMA asked "tits or ass?"
You're right about reddit karma though. One of the good things about HN is that throwaway joke posts like that are downvoted/flagged/otherwise discouraged. I can guess the top comment for any given Reddit comment section with like 90% accuracy just because it's going to be the most obvious joke possible based on the submission title, and Reddit users love upvoting those for some reason.
https://fandomwire.com/karma-slapped-ea-with-the-most-downvo... (there are probably better articles about it out there, I quit reddit a long time ago)
Seems like the downsides are about the same as in other forums. It depends on if your account is anonymous or not.
> You get points for every answer that someone does to your comment, and the downvotes you get on your own comments don't offset the gained points.
I don’t think that’s right. You don’t get points for replies, you get points for upvotes. And downvotes you get also affect your overall karma, though you don’t seemingly have an upper bound on upvotes but I have read there is a lower bound of -4. An upvote on a submission seems to also be worth less than an upvote on a comment, though I’m not sure of the ratio (half? one third?).
> These points have real utility to make money indirectly: the more points you have, the more credibility you have on this platform and capacity to push a story.
I don’t think that’s right either. Once you can downvote and flag (500 karma?), more points don’t give you anything extra. Personally I rarely check someone’s points, only when viewing comment history or trying to identify spammers and other obvious bad actors.
> This is why I am collecting points on all my fake accounts, because once I have collected enough karma points, I can upvote my startup speech on Hackernews using these shadow accounts.
HN has voting ring detection. Though I can’t speak for how effective it is.
I'd say HN's problem is rooted in that many folks participate in malicious contrarianism.
We're more likely to keep arguing here when disagreeing than to agree and add much.
And again, this isn't limited to internet but irl too.
And they are heavily moderated against negative discussion/ragebait.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3652533/
>specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information.
This is a human problem and it happens everywhere.
For any forum to remain positive the following occurs.
1. the forum population is tiny and self controlling.
2. There is a lot of moderation to keep it from turning into a burning garbage dump.
3. There are no other choices, the above two is all that exist.
So? You have to do that because it takes one toxic person to poison the well. HN is aggressively moderated to get rid of articles and opinions that don't belong too. Without it, it would be just a constant stream of self-promotion and politics.
The point is that in certain other places, someone (the moderators) worked to nourish a positive culture and it worked. HN didn't and it shows. I don't think that negativity is necessary to keep the forum interesting. Especially given that HN's negativity really isn't all that insightful. A lot of negative takes are bad, and many of them are written without reading the article, or by cherrypicking a single sentence and attacking that.
You don't get tech without negativity. And honestly HN is very tame compared to most forums when it comes to the deeply negative.
The problem with maintaining (only) positivity in tech is you turn into $large_companies marketing department. We have to step up and say security flaws exist. That companies outright lie. That some idea (when it comes to programming) are objectively bad.
Hence why the OP is here on the thread talking about what negativity means in this particular case, because it also counts criticism.
This is something we tell ourselves to rationalize bad behavior. How come that 3D printing forums or woodworking forums or car maintenance forums can exist without toxicity, but tech somehow can't? There are people pushing products everywhere. You can ban marketing content or set ground rules for it.
Further, performative cynicism really isn't that helpful. It's not insightful to hear that every company is evil and greedy, every personal project sucks, every scientific study is wrong, and every blogger is incompetent.
If anyone wants to get a taste what an unmoderated HN would look like, check out /new and see how much garbage is submitted.
In fact, computer science, electrical engineering, and mathematics are pretty uniquely toxic and we keep rationalizing it.
I remember working on a technical blog post for my company, trying to anticipate many of the possible HN rebukes and proactively address them as much as we could. And I remember having a conversation with a PR person who was genuinely taken aback by the hostility we've come to expect in our industry.
When I was still visiting Reddit my subreddit list was short and focused on a few hobbies and tech topics. Even those subreddits had become overtaken with cynical doomerism and toxic responses to everything. For a while I could still get some value out of select comments, but eventually everyone who wanted real discussion gave up and left. Now even when interesting or helpful topics get posted it’s like the commenters are sharks circling and waiting for any opportunity to bring doom and gloom to any subject.
I'm sure many of us would take it much further, but I hope we can appreciate its not an easy task.
You're also comparing Apples to Oranges by comparing zero tolerance records for subs vs average across all posts of hn.
Sometimes, I will see a screenshot of someone using reddit or YouTube "unfiltered" and it's night and day, full of slop and ragebait everywhere. No thanks!
My only difference of opinion with you is that I don't find positive content boring. I find positive things exciting and engaging! Negative content just makes me want to tune out, for the most part, unless it's some cathartic or amusing scenario like the recent thread here about SO imploding lol.
YouTube is also similiar. I need to be quite careful what to click so "my algorithm" stays interesting and wholesome. If I click on any remotely baity and negative video, the recommendations algo picks it up almost immediately and devolves into garbage.
"Am I the asshole for leaving my spouse because they pushed me down the stairs and murdered my dog? He's also a member of an ultra-nationalist terror organization and doesn't put his cart away at the grocery store.
My friends and family have chimed in with mixed sentiments on social media. Some are praising me and others are telling me I'm wrong."
The account will of course be brand new and all of the top comments will be accounts that solely respond to similar bait posts on similar subreddits. It reminds me of subreddit simulator, it's bots talking to bots. My personal conspiracy theory is that reddit encourages this AI bait slop because it drives engagement and gets people to see more ads. The stories are like the soap operas I sometimes watched with my mom growing up.
Could have I created a new account instead? Maybe. Did I want to check if DSA actually works in practice and can get me back my u/Tenemo nickname that I use everywhere, not just on Reddit? I sure did! Turns out Reddit cannot legally ban me from their platform without a valid reason, no matter what is in the ToS. Pretty cool!
Back to using RiF with a fresh API key after that and haven't had any issues since.
Nothing gets people engaged more than making them angry.
Now in the last couple years, both my sisters have discovered reddit, and hanging out with them is like the god damn /r/all comments sections all over again. So insidious.
Is pessimism a consciouss choice?
One can develop pessimism about pessimism without a conscious choice, but once you become aware of how negative your outlook on pessimism is, it's a conscious choice to not try to figure out the different meanings of that word and how important it is for the proper functioning of democracy.
Maybe read Orwell for a glimpse of mandatory optimism:
"The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one... Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen.
I am much more pessimistic generally than I was 20 years ago. But that's something I work on, not something I accept passively as a fact of life.
Thank heavens young Americans can look forward to a $63k/year median income when they are employed full-time.
This is no reason for abject pessimism at 18 years old.
I would think something like Gini combined with HDI and GDP per capita, on which the US only fares well on the latter. I found out there is something called Global Social Mobility Index, done by the WEF, and it places the US in 27th.
And this is borne out in emigration patterns and visa applications...
It feels like we expect to be #1 in every category and we're unable to recognize that the US has it pretty damn good in a lot of important ways. Envy is the thief of happiness.
Of course the US has less of a social safety net than Norway, a petrostate with trillions of dollars in a national oil endowment, and ~half of their GDP is from fossil fuels. I don't know that I'd want to move to Norway for the kind of "social mobility" that I'm after.
Life is bleak if you perceive it to be bleak.
There are many other factors you could evaluate it on, though, and many of them are harder to quantify. Stuff like personal agency, status, leisure time, social life, community cohesion, etc.
- easy access to clean water
- sufficient calories
- safe shelter
- education (presumably they can read and write if they’re on Reddit)
- internet access
- free time (can’t be writing nasty comments on Reddit if you’re swinging a pick axe in a coal mine)
Many of these things can’t be claimed by millions in the world.
And yet, it’s one of the most cynical, negative places on the internet.
Everything you listed are reasons NOT to be so cynical
TRUTH.
Which is to say, the feelings of doom are quite widespread. There's a good argument to be made that it underlies the rise of trumpism: people in the sticks feeling abandonment, resentment, and doom, and expressing it at the ballot box.
The problem reddit has is the celebration of it's doomerism, even in the small hobby subs the vibe is still present. The highest upvoted comments are so nauseatingly repetitive and formulaic, ridden with whatever the contemporary dogma of reddit is, substantiated by snowballs of echo-chamber fallacy with pebbles of truth in the middle.
But that's not what I'm saying, so there's that.
Anyway, everybody (barring the global ultra-poor) is obviously aware that their standard of living is much higher than that of most of history. This is not novel, not hard to realise, and certainly not a discussion-terminating point.
In the Western world every single generation since WWII has roughly speaking lived better than their parents. For people currently in their 20s, this is on track not to be the case. The "democratic normalcy" is under attack. Wealth inequality was reaching literal Gilded Age levels... and has now barreled past that with no sign of stopping. And yes, algorithmic social media running anger-maximisation machines on a planetary scale. Shall I go on? The point being that "medieval peasants didn't have microwaves" is immaterial to the discussion.
Young people protested Gaza, climate change, racism, massive wealth disparity and they just don't see the results. Governments, economic systems and societies just keep the status quo.
As for environment degradation in general, just because prior predictions were wrong doesn't mean the biosphere isn't still headed in the wrong direction for sustainability. Maybe we have the right governance and economics to adapt in time, but that's not a guarantee.
Being positive about everything seems like a really privileged position. It also maintains the status quo. If you're Ukrainian, how positive would you feel about your country's future? How positive is Europe about NATO and it's future with the US right about now. How are Canadians feeling about their neighbor to the South? Are they confident future US elections will self-correct?
Maybe over the long term it all works itself out and human progress continues to the stars or whatever. Or maybe we're going to be part of a Great Filter intelligent species face because of short sightedness and powerful technologies they unleash. Or maybe we'll just muddle along with some gains and then losses. Civilizations rise and fall, we really don't know how positive the future will be.
There have always been wars and skirmishes around the world. Ukraine and Gaza are today's. There will be others tomorrow. Different tribes of humans just don't get along, never have.
If you think the environment is bad now, you should have seen it in the 1970s. Chemicals dumped everywhere, rivers on fire, cities choked in smog.
But the long term trend is always positive. Things are better now for more people than they ever have been.
We really don't know that democracy will always prevail, that capitalism is sustainable in the long term, and that our current global civilization is immune to collapse. We don't know there will never be a nuclear war or that climate change won't hit the wrong tipping point. We don't know that humanity's future will continue to be better off indefinitely.
Right. We don't. And we never did. What I was saying is that when I was young, there was plenty of reason to believe everything would go to hell soon... and we were wrong, things got a lot better. There's just no way to know.
The last Romans living in the Roman Empire in 400AD may have also concluded that their problems would eventually be solved and they would continue thriving, just like they had for a thousand years. But they would be wrong. Just go back to 100AD and they would be mostly right: they still had a good 300 years in front of them (so they would never see a collapse, nor their children and grandchildren).
So yeah, eventually things will undoubtedly take a very negative turn. The question really is, will that be in 10, 100 or 1000 years? You don't know, I don't know. But given the above , I think it's fair to conclude that by being positive you're almost always correct.
Getting older what I have realized is that the enthusiasm of the youth is born from the lack of experience, lack of responsibility, lack of anything to lose, and a position to really only gain from any changes. When you are young you are largely a spectator to the game, and just like any other game, your views will change when you become a player instead of an armchair expert.
old.reddit.com##div[data-subreddit="politics"]
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old.reddit.com##.link:has-text(/Trump|MAGA/i)
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15 years ago there were nice discussions happening on reddit, now all the comments are one liner stupid jokes from people who never even bothered to read the article and people calling you a bootlicker if you don't agree with every nonsense against Trump/Musk/some billionaire.
Also, more and more of them are bots which are trained to regurgitate themes that get a lot of engagement.
Ironically, the above comment scored 99.9% negativity.
R/weightlifting used to be total cesspool of rumors and gossip about athletes and coaches, but at some point the sub course corrected and got more heavily moderated. The result is a completely uninteresting feed of technique videos that are actually just kids showing off their latest PR.
However, the sub also aggressively reenforces that mediocrity. I posted what I thought was an interesting video of Lebron James doing a weightlifting drill, (with much lighter weight than a competitive lifter) and commenters jumped all the way up my ass about it being off topic, but also how Lebron has terrible weightlifting technique. No compelling discussion about weightlifting for elite athletes in other sports was had...
I do the same as you. If any post is harming my mental health, I just must the entire sub. But then weirder and weirder stuff just keeps surfacing. Some of it is funny though; like it keeps showing me alien subreddits now, which I find funny because I'm pretty sure 65% of the comments are just satire.
It seems to me they made an algorithmic change a few years back where positive comment are greatly boosted. Since then then the "top" comments are always over-the-top exuberant.
They are either easily to classify as useless when they don’t provide reasoning or they provide useful insight to think about.
If often submit links to HN for that kind of feedback
If skepticism towards business announcements counts as negativity, I wonder what else we'd be discussing regarding any of those announcements.
An OpenAI marketing piece for instance will already go overboard on the positive side, I don't see relevant commentary being about how it's even better than the piece touts it. Commenting just to say "wow, that's great" or paraphrasing the piece is also useless and thrown upon. At best it would be a factual explanation or expansion of some harder to parse or specialized bits ?
I read the pre published PDF but don't really see stand what we were supposed to take from this blog post in particular.
Aldo am I basically fullfiling the blog post prophecy ?
PS: I think articles that raise to the top page with absolutely no comments would be an example of people straight enjoying the content, and the site actually working great IMHO
I'd argue it's a good thing that they just report the data and then you can draw your own conclusions about whether this is good or bad.
Yes. I think the post does well to make the point that "negativity" comes in two forms, critical and toxic. Lumping the two seems like an oversight, to me.
Similarly, how does inquisitive perform?
Inquisitive posts, of course, can largely look for question marks.
I think a lot of this boils down to "tone is hard to decipher in text." And is a large part of why so many of us default to assuming an aggressive tone from others. (Though, my personal pet idea there is that people are largely afraid to use questions more.)
You could measure in two ways:
1) raw score for the post. Look at the distribution of total scores and remove the low scoring posts. I personally think this will remove more negative posts than positive. (Note: this would be another way to look at this: for the posts with an overall negative sentiment, does the post score more or less).
2) total number of unique people participating in the discussion. The more dynamic posts tend to be more positive, or at least balanced in my mind (might be wrong, but that's my gut feeling).
3) You could also look at the peak rank of the post -- if the post stayed on the front page for more than 1 hour, but this seems more arbitrary and difficult.
I think the idea here is that posts aren't created equal and some have different engagement patterns. What I'd like to know is if a post is skewing negative, does it get more or less traction. What are the incentives for the poster vs the commenter? Both get karma points, but does a commenter get more for being negative vs does a poster get more points for submitting articles expected to have a negative discussion?
There are a number of other questions, like are there keywords that tend to produce negative posts (for example: are posts talking about AWS more positive or negative). Or - are there topics that generally perform better? Are "expected" posts better? Are more "unique" posts better? Are "Show HN" posts more positive than other posts?
I'd be happy to help - info in bio if you're interested.
Rather a lot of what is said in any given social circle has to do with complaining. It's very common for people to point out something that is viewed as bad by everyone. Then the group commiserates and bonds over that. Even though an AI might consider such complaints negative, there might be a positive effect on people feeling heard and supported by a like-minded group.
For this reason, I'd take OP's results with a modicum of salt. Human interaction doesn't have to be all rainbows and unicorns to have a positive psychological impact. As with in-person interactions, I suspect a significant portion of what OP's LLM's described as negative might just be humans bonding through complaint among peers.
I would expect most comments on HN to be critical and argumentative, but that isn't negativity. Being dismissive without good reason, or actually saying mean things (violates rules) would be clear negativity. But disagreement and questioning things, is part of how we all learn and share information. Matter of fact, the fastest way to learn things (as the meme goes) is to state something obviously incorrect and let people disagree with you, and show you a better way.
In the few years I've been on HN, it's been very rare to see an actual negative comment that isn't simply someone having a sincere opinion different from someone else, and not getting flagged or downvoted-heavily.
Would the author view this comment as negative, or would they see it as inquisitive? Because I'm not even criticizing anything the OP said or did, I'm genuinely wondering.
Mostly people only comment when there's something wrong
In my neighborhood an electrical power outage is news; but yet another day of consistent electrical power supply is not news. But taking a step back, I think it is noteworthy! It makes my life better every day, and compared to the vast sweep of human history, it’s a huge positive anomaly. My life is full of stuff like this, as I suspect the lives are of many HNers.
I say this because while I do value news reporting and knowing what’s wrong or could be better, I also try hard to maintain this broader awareness of what’s (still) positive and going well. Even if its consistency makes it seem unremarkable on short time scales like the daily news cycle.
This hit a nerve in a good way.
Something I think about is intersection of "cringe"-like content and genuine uplifting content. There's tons of stuff out there about how people take care of themselves, how they're improving their health, hair, body, mood, whatever. Obviously the influencer world is present in this sphere of content.
I suspect the content that leans way towards cringe goes way more viral, but if you step back, it's great so many people are trying/doing so many healthy and self-care-oriented things and making themselves feel better bit by bit.
But often these negative/contrary to stablished opinion, or opinions done with passion (but still nore are less respectful), are the most valuable to me, as they give me the oppressed to think outside the box, to ask me questions I would not ask myself if not…
Say, this is not a negative comment but may be interpreted to have a negative sentiment due to disagreement with their core thesis.
The most controversial submissions always have a tighter comment to upvote ratio.
The most controversial comments tend to be the most replied to.
I mean, this is pretty much what you'd expect, right? A social network where the focus was on saying how wonderful announcements and industry practices were would be rather boring/pointless.
What if 65% of what's being discussed is stupid or evil? Then 65% negativity would seem to be proportionate. What if 80% of what's posted is stupid? Or 20%?
That's the only way you can really make this number meaningful. You can't just look at the number and read in some undisciplined interpretation.
(And frankly, consider this. Suppose person A makes a claim. Now suppose person B agrees with that claim and person C disagrees with that claim. Who is more likely to respond? If B agrees and has nothing to add, no additional depth or insight to provide, then there is no reason for a followup comment. An upvote suffices. But if C disagrees, then there's something to contradict and a reason to followup with an explanation of why there is disagreement.)
This.. doesn't sound negative to me, at least in how I'd use the word. Substantive critiques and skepticism?
Geez I guess even this very comment would be considered negative because I'm critiquing what they wrote. Amazing post! I absolutely agree! Well done!
Analysing perfection yields not much compared to analysing crap.
There’s just a world of difference between “I don’t like React because I don’t want to write HTML in my JavaScript” and “React sux a$$”
Both are negative statements, but it doesn’t make sense to group them together.
Like…is this comment itself a “negative” comment? Maybe. But I want the author to improve and I think most people here do too…and that’s where HN really shines.
Just need to find the right scissor statement to really get the debate going.
Good job.
But afterwards I'm glad I did, after a month comments can't really haunt you anymore, because they exist in the past.
I'd much rather live in a critical world than a "wholesome" world that ends up being an echochamber
That is the key takeaway. If critique is scored as negative, then there is nothing wrong with HN being "negative". Analysis and critical response to new ideas, tech, and products is a good thing, so I believe we should be responding positively to a report that says we apply negativity in productive ways.
The definition above indicates "negative" may be a bit harsh as a term, it might be useful to see a split of that percentage between "unnecessary pushback" and "scrutiny".
This comment will of course count as negative - it could no doubt be more substantive and better written but hopefully it is understood in the latter sense.
The central knowledge shared is that knowledge behaves like germs and can spread. Those that play on emotions spread better, and among the thought germs that spread based on emotions, the ones that play on anger spread the best.
Worst yet: There are anger based thought germs which live in symbiosis and harmony even if they cause conflict among the humans who hold that germs. You can see this take hold when communities exist entirely of folks who hold a singular belief and they spend all day constructing and destroying uncharitable straw men of opposing ideas.
I've noticed that Reddit _really_ likes this sort of content and fosters these sorts of communities. Communities at scale on reddit quickly become about fostering negatives: hatred of others, blame on the system, self-pity, snarky responses. Instead of the better and more effective: tactical empathy, acceptance and understanding what is within your personal sphere of influence, concrete actions, personal improvements, and forgiveness.
I'm definitely not saying one has to accept the world for how it is, or that it's fair, or anything like that. Humans should change this world! You should vote, you should volunteer, you should help your neighbor, you should understand and be kind to others with different beliefs, and perhaps under the extreme you should die for your beliefs to help enact them.
What you shouldn't do though is spend all day reading and posting memes about subjects you are already familiar with. If you've already made up your mind and are informed on a subject you don't need another meme to help radicalize yourself.
See the difference between mass shooters and hero's like Daryl Davis [2].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc [2] https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...
See also:
https://corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-i...
Negative posts outperform because they create unfinished cognitive work. A clean, agreeable story closes the loop, a contested claim or engagement opens and follows the open loop.
And that negativity breeds engagement, well we already knew that. Entire industries have cropped up around engagement with negative sentiment and made some people exceedingly wealthy.
Hmm... Technical critiques are very different from truly negative comments. I'm not sure they should be lumped together. Technical critiques are often interesting and useful.
In my experience, truly negative comments which don't meet the guidelines rarely appear on HN, and when they do appear, they tend to disappear very, very quickly, thanks to the moderators.
I recall there being studies on financial loss vs gain, and that financial losses seem to effect emotions about 4x more than wins, so for an actual balanced algorithm, it would seem that positive posts should be boosted about 4-5x to have any chance of being surfaced on a modern social network. Given what we know about human psychology, sentiment boosts really should be a thing. Is anyone working on that?
"There is a bush with berries over there" is news.
"There is a tiger in that bush over there" is adrenaline inducing huge news.
Given that, it seems that there is basically zero agreement between DistilBERT and the other models..... In fact even worse they disagree to the extreme with some saying the most positive score is the most negative score.... (even acounting for the inverted scale in results 2-6).
For HN titles, which tend to be evaluative and critical, I assumed DistilBERT's framing fits better than the alternatives. But the disagreement between models actually shows that "sentiment" is task-dependent rather than some universal measure. I'll add a methodology section in the revision to clarify why this model was chosen.
It would be interesting to see some of the comments that seem to be polar oposites in sentiments between the models. So ones where they are the most positive sentiment by one model but the most negative by another to analyse the cases where they disagree the most on their definition of sentiment.
Ironically, I suspect this article’s title would rightly be evaluated as negative in sentiment analysis.
1. Binning skepticism with negativity.
2. Not allowing for a "neutral" category.
The comment I'm writing right now is critical, but is it "negative?" I certainly don't mean it that way.
It's cool that OP made this thing. The data is nicely presented, and the conclusion is articulated cleanly, and that's precisely why I'm able to build a criticism of it!
And I'm now realizing that I don't normally feel the need to disclaim my criticism by complimenting the OP's quality work. Maybe I should do that more. Or, maybe my engagement with the material implies that I found it engaging. Hmm.
It's a matter of perspective. The OP is a negative post. You are negative about it. Therefore, you have made a positive post.
On the neutral category: the model outputs continuous scores from 0 to 1, so neutrality does exist around 0.5. The bimodal distribution with peaks at roughly 0.0 and 0.95 reflects how HN users tend toward strong evaluative positions. Three-class models could provide additional perspective, and that's worth exploring in future work.
Also love your meta-observation. Imo your comment is critical, substantive, and engaging. By sentiment metrics it's "negative," but functionally it's high-quality discourse. But that's exactly how I read the data: HN's negativity is constructive critique that drives engagement, not hostility.
https://huggingface.co/distilbert/distilbert-base-uncased-fi...
this is so far from how people are interpreting your results that I'd say it's busted. your work might be high-quality, but if the semantic choices make it impossible to engage with then it's not really a success.
Imo it's on the individual members of the groupthinkers to realize a math term (negatives are a thing in math) applied to mathematical data is not a qualitative attack on anyone; they must accept the groupthink has lost the plot.
Consensus isn't always preferable. See religion.
The context is obviously a mathematical analysis and math comes with negatives.
If the critiques had actual substance to contribute to the world they wouldn't be so easily offended. Publishing low effort complaints that are little more than demands by far away randos to better to conform to their arbitrary standards is a laughable expectation. Internet randos can pound sand; they prop up nothing individually or collectively given most forums are a few thousand to tens of thousands of unique people with a platform but no real democratic power.
Social media hyper-normalizing sentiment is just empowering social bullying by pressuring people doing the necessary work to think include the bike-shedding of non-contributors. Whole bunch of farm animals want to eat bread while letting the rooster do the work.
Any examples where it's not preferable?
Wisdom-of-Crowds coin-jar experiment: independent guesses are noisy, but their average reliably approximates the true count, showing group aggregation beats most individuals.
> What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs.
my mental model of the comment section on any page is "let's get all the people interested in this article in the room and see what they talk about" rather than "here is a discussion about this article specific"
i also assume that <50% of the people in any comment section have actually read the original article and are just people hopping in to have a convo about something tangetially related to the headline.
"Off topic but...", "The CSS on this site...", "Have you noticed this web page is 5/10/20MB...", "Why is the webpage making 20+ requests...", "Microsoft bla bla bla...", "Elon Musk bla bla bla...", "I havent used cryptocurrency at all and it is bad because..."
All of these on some post about a new library release or government policy or social commentary.
https://huggingface.co/distilbert/distilbert-base-uncased-fi...
I've never done any sentiment analysis outside of hobby tinkering. Maybe there is some HN experts that will chime in on how to deal with it?
It’s a great exercise to reframe constructive feedback. Here is a more positive, affirming version of that post that maintains the original insight while shifting the tone to one of appreciation and partnership. A Positive Reframing
ryukoposting 17 hours ago | parent | context | flag | on: 65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment...
The OP has done a fantastic job putting this together! It’s such an interesting dataset that it really invites deeper exploration into how we categorize human speech. I think we can make this even more accurate by looking at two exciting opportunities:
* Celebrating Skepticism: We could distinguish between "negativity" and "healthy skepticism." Often, a critical eye is actually a sign of deep interest and a desire to refine a great idea.
* The Value of "Neutral": Adding a neutral category could highlight the balanced, objective discussions that happen here, showing just how nuanced the community’s input really is. I’m writing this because I’m genuinely inspired by the quality of the presentation and how clearly the conclusions are articulated. It’s exactly that clarity that makes it so easy and fun to brainstorm improvements! I’m realizing now how much I enjoy engaging with high-quality work like this. It’s a reminder that even when we’re being analytical, it’s because the original content is truly engaging. Kudos to the OP for sparking such a thoughtful conversation.
Key Changes Made: * From "Assumptions" to "Opportunities": Instead of pointing out flaws in logic, it frames the points as ways to build upon an already strong foundation. * Emphasis on Inspiration: It explicitly states that the criticism is a result of being impressed by the work, rather than just "not meaning to be negative." * Active Appreciation: It turns the "Maybe I should do that more" realization into a proactive statement of gratitude for the OP’s effort. Would you like me to try another version focused on a specific tone, like "professional" or "enthusiastic"?
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Even if you hate it, the vibe of that is completely different.
Both express the same basic criticism; you've just replaced the neutral tone with something that's perhaps more effective as a vomitory than as a criticism.
I wonder how well an automated tool to go in the reverse direction would work in practice? With an accompanying style transfer GAN to rewrite the Corporate Memphis hellscape.
It's so mealymouthed my internal sentiment analysis grades it as insanely toxic.
Nobody actually talks like this. And if they do they have a terrible office culture.
While engineers, especially those that like to share knowledge and open source solutions are far more critical of monetizing products.
Overall HN doesn't lack criticism, since there many technically minded people around. But I like the mix to be honest and agree that skepticism is often seen as simple negativity. Sure, you probably don't want to advertise your product as "pretty decent, but there are numerous better theoretical solutions".
As with most things, the devil’s in the details. There are plenty of ways to express criticism without descending to personal attacks. I’ve also noticed that when the cynicism/criticism-o-meter runs too high, there’s almost always a top-level meta comment complaining about the complaining.
Personally I’d rather someone tell me I have a piece of food stuck in my teeth than shower me with praise.
You're also right that HN's moderation probably removes hostile content quickly (which is why I prefer this platform to other roptions tbh). So the negativity we observe is mostly substantive critique rather than personal attacks.
That said, I'd push back a bit on whether this makes the finding less interesting. If anything, the opposite seems true. The fact that HN's "negativity" is constructive criticism, and that this criticism correlates with 27% higher engagement, tells us something about how technical communities value critical analysis over promotional framing. The classifier limitation is real (also see my other replies), but the engagement correlation holds whether we call it "negative sentiment" or "evaluative critique."
I'll add a limitations section to make the terminology clearer: "negative sentiment" as used here means evaluative criticism detected by SST-2-trained models, not personal attacks or toxic comments. Thanks for your feedback!
I also strongly feel the tech industry has in general gotten a lot gloomier since its hayday before souless MBA's and pervasive user-hostile practices started ruining everything.
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1) I do not understand in any way the sentiment that discussion should ideally consist of people agreeing with and encouraging each other.
The reason I speak with people is either to inform or learn. If I'm informing, this is not really a discussion. I'm just telling people something that they may not know. There are two ways to learn: one is to listen and not speak, which is the mirror of the above. The way to learn through speaking is that somebody says something, I dispute or question that thing, and that person shows me why I'm wrong.
So the way to learn while speaking is that someone says something, I say something negative about that thing, and then that person says something negative about the negative thing I've just said.
Friends and family are what you need, not the empty, uninformed, ritualistic, and above all socially-pressured positive comment of strangers.
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2) Following up on the first point (which is mainly a personal observation), it's important to say (although completely unsurprising and obvious) that negativity is relative. On HN (or reddit, or any comment site), the first post or OP is assigned positivity.
A great example is this very OP, which is an accusation of negativity on Hacker News, which with no context is quite obviously a post with negative sentiment. The way you would grade reactions to it in a vacuum would say that other posts disputing its conclusions are positive.
Its methodology, however, requires that the posts disputing it be graded as negative: "Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs." What are the OPs that contain these posts? Links to technologies and technology advocates, announcements, recommendations of particular practices, descriptions of APIs.
Accusations of negativity and tone policing are always content-free social control. If I set my point of view as positive and uplifting (while posting about how HN and reddit and social media are evil poison promulgated by evil people who should be physically stopped to save civilization), I can silence dispute through calling the mods rather than through discussion.
The more indefensible my position is, the more I will prefer the sort of "discussion" where I say something, other people dispute it, and I accuse them of being negative people with implications of bad faith and possibly psychological unsoundness.
- People with expertise / exceptional qualities are by definition out-numbered by the rest, so there must be privileged seats if you want quality to become represented.
- Social coherence requires turning lots of conversations into a few, again requiring fewer privileged seats to represent views efficiently and have conversations between well-informed people trusted by those they represent.
- Preventing runaway power feedback loops from reinforcing one single set of views requires that independent hierarchies can exist, which is pluralism.
https://positron.solutions/articles/hierarchy-elevates-socia...
HN post about sentiment analysis on the site and the top comment and thread is just “reddit bad xd”. So glad these sort of novel, riveting conversations are being had here.
The cooorrrrrporatioooons! OooOOooOoOOoo!
Humans have a powerful negativity and bad-news bias. It's probably a left over adaptation. "If you mistake a bush for a lion, you're fine. If you mistake a lion for a bush, you're dead." Your paranoid negativity-biased ancestors survived.
And at least the negativity allows us to fix the problems. I’m actually sick of modern toxic positivity, problems that could be fixed early are deliberately ignored until they couldn’t be ignored anymore.
Does it? A lot of the negativity is structural (late stage capitalism and all), and there is very little talk regarding fixing these issues.
> ... we observe extreme inequality in attention distribution. The Gini coefficient of 0.89 places HN among the most unequal attention economies documented in the literature. For comparison, Zhu & Lerman (2016) reported Gini co-efficients of 0.68–0.86 across Twitter metrics. ... The bottom 80% of posts [on HN] receive less than 10% of total upvotes. (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5910263)
This could probably be explained by HN's unique exposure mechanism. Every post starts on /newest and unless it gets picked up by the smaller group of users who browse /newest, it never reaches the front page where the main audience is. In most forums/subreddits by contrast a new post (unless it gets flagged as spam) usually gets some baseline exposure with the main audience before it sinks. On HN the main audience is downstream of an early gate and missing that gate is close to being effectively invisible. IMO this fact alone could probably explain why "attention inequality" seems more extreme on HN.
Consider that purely positive but otherwise unconstructive comments like "wow great project! clap" are – for good reason – not what the HN comment feature is intended for and are reliably downvoted to oblivion.
Contentious, challenging, or even slightly provocative reactions however – which are inherently somewhat negative in a wider sense – usually kick off fruitful debates and knowledge-proliferation.
And I probably speak for at least about ~65% of fellow HN's when I say that the latter is what I come here for.
Headline: “I went to the doctor and everything was normal.”
Discussion: “That’s nice.”
Headline: “I went to the doctor and I have been diagnosed with X”
Discussion: “X means Y or Z. If Y, A,B,C. If Z, P,Q,R”
We need to do something and are working on it. The challenge is to distinguish thoughtful critique from negativity-venting. The former is fine, the latter is lame. HN has a lot of the latter.
I believe it has to do with macro trends (in society at large and on the internet), which we can't expect to be immune from—but also with the community here getting insular. That scares and worries me, because HN won't survive over the long haul if new cohorts of users don't keep showing up. Along with that, there seem to be increased waves of jadedness, bitterness, and cynicism that use this place as a dumping ground for bad feelings.
That's a bad dynamic. The more it happens, the more it encourages more of it. Meanwhile, people who don't enjoy jaded, bitter, or denunciatory rhetoric are incentivized to leave: a classic vicious circle.
This is why we added the following to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html last year: Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.
You'll probably see more statements from us about this in 2026, and hopefully some changes to HN, as we try to do something about it.
* As dang and many know and appreciate, online communities themselves "age", and if you don't keep getting fresh new people in, they shrink. And, regardless, the focus tends to change over time, from original topic, more to meta and/or familiar/comfortable socializing. From what I've seen in some communities, I'm not so sure that aging of the participants is the main factor behind that.
* I think HN should be more conscientious about stereotypes around age, and making generalizations about that. Not only because much of HN is closely adjacent to hiring, and in the US, that's getting into illegal territory. Also, because ageism is often unfair, in general, and to individuals, yet is already widespread in the tech industry. We risk the new people that HN does acquire picking up messages about what ages, genders, ethnicities, etc. they should be hiring, and those messages right now are dim.
If you don't appreciate or care about this now, because you're not yet on the receiving end, I think you probably will within a few years, unless you help change the techbro culture now.
If you find it hard to believe that you'll be on the receiving end, because you are so highly-skilled, have a prestigious resume, have stellar recommendations, have always been a 10x rockstar ninja whatever, you keep updating your skills, you've memorized every LeetCode question, etc.: my experience is that it will be hard to believe when it happens, but it nevertheless will. You'll be in an interview, and the interviewer will make a snide remark that's ill-founded, but regardless, you're probably not getting an offer. And then it will happen many times. And your best "network" will FIRE and be out of the game, or be facing ageism themselves and not in a position to refer you. Then you'll jack in to the HN holographic VR AI cyberspace hivemind of a few years from now, and see people promoting the ideas that seem to match the snarky interviewer's thinking.
My current analysis was a ~30 day snapshot, but I’d love to help get a clearer picture of the "macro trends" you’re worried about.
If you’re open to it, I’d be happy to collaborate on a deeper temporal analysis. Specifically, I could:
Map the "Sentiment vs. Performance" premium over a 10-year horizon to see if negativity is becoming more "rewarded" by the algorithm/community over time.
Segment "Substantive Critique" vs. "Generic Negativity" (venting) to see if the latter is actually the growth driver, as you suspect.
Run my workflow (DistilBERT, Llama 3.1, etc.) against any internal data you might have that isn't easily accessible via the public API (like flag rates or deleted comment correlations) to refine the "toxicity vs. critique" classifier.
The goal would be to provide a data-driven baseline for the changes you're planning this year. Happy to discuss further here or via email.
That's fairly basic human nature, unfortunately; especially in today's climate.
For myself, I try to keep it positive. I am quite capable of going really dark (have done so, in the past), but I don't like to shit where I eat. I also feel that I need to recompense for some of the nastiness I used to spew, last century.
That said, my sunshine approach gets some pretty nasty responses. I have to bite my keyboard, and not respond as I'd like.
I just say "Have a great day!", which means I'm done engaging. I have found letting the other party have the last word, ties off the fight.
Having a healthy personal mindset is a different matter. Which is not some public discussion boards business.
interesting - why use cloudflare vs say hf inference or modal? and is this replicate-cloudflare or normal cloudflare?
Flame away ;)
Even in terms of language, if a USian says "great!", they mean passable, and "ok" means bad.
Imo this is the result of corporate culture being so prevalent it has leaked out into general culture.. The corporate world of bullshit, just be really positive towards your boss and pretend everything is great, all that matters is the hype and getting more investment this quarter.
Also, engineering types tend to be a lot more "negative" relative to those corporate business guys.. If you want to engineer something, and make it work, and actually do a good job, then you need to appraise things realistically and objectively, and you certainly need to point out stupid decisions and bad design.
HN:
Vietnam banning ads, AI for drug discovery, geolocating vehicle pic - I'd say two positive one neutral
Google News (UK):
Trump wanting Greenland, Storm Goretti snow, hero could get posthumous award - I'd say two negative one neutral
So maybe HNers have a positive bias after all?
So...
If you say something is going to suck, and it actually sucks, you look like a genius. If you say something is going to suck, and it actually is ok, nobody cares because things turned out fine. If you say something is going to be good, and it turns out good, people say you're smart. If you say something is going to be good, and it turns out to suck, people say you're a moron.
Because of negative bias and game theory, the most logical take to get "social rewards" is be consistently pessimistic. You'll look "smart" online and the times you miss it will be largely ignored. If the reward you get from interacting online is some sort of social capital, being a pessimist will do better than being an optimist unless you're certain things will turn out good. So people tend to be negative.
Or, as I've heard it stated before, "pessimists get to be right, optimists get to be rich."
- SST-2 (stanford sentiment test) example dataset from IMDB reviews https://huggingface.co/datasets/stanfordnlp/sst2/viewer
- BERT https://aclanthology.org/N19-1423/
- DistilBert -- the optimized model OP was using https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.01108
SST-2 may have been used to train or qualify BERT -- read the papers to get the full story. I did a quick perusal.
It would be nice to have a nutritional label shared with Abstracts, showing the training data, with examples, and the base models.
If I respond to an article about open-source with “open-source is good”, article about privacy with “privacy is good” etc. with a basic justification and slightly fancier words, I’ll almost surely get upvotes. But I see those opinions on this site practically every day.
I wish people would instead upvote posts and comments with uncommon knowledge and opinions. I do see the former: cool projects and “fun facts” (e.g. an article about the cultural history of an isolated small region) are constantly on the front page and in top comments. But the latter are only in /new and further down comments.
ozempicgandalf•1d ago