Back when Reddit allowed API access, I used a reader (rif) which allowed blocking subreddits. I did an experiment where I would browse /r/all and block any subreddit that had a toxic, gruesome, nsfw, or other content playing on negative emotions (like a pseudo feel-good post based on an otherwise negative phenomena). After a few years, and hundreds of banned subreddits, my /r/all was very wholesome, but contained only animal or niche hobby related subreddits. It was quite eye-opening on how negative reddit is, and also revealed how boring it is without the kind of algorithmic reaction seeking content.
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: 45% -> 35%
OP's classifiers make two assumptions that I'd bet strongly influence the result:
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.
OP here :) On skepticism being lumped with negativity: partially true. The SST-2 training task treats critical evaluation as negative sentiment. I should clarify that "negative" here means evaluative or critical, not hostile. HN's culture of substantive critique registers as negative by these metrics, but that's arguably a feature of technical discourse rather than toxicity.
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.
I was about to make a comment about skepticism, thank you for adding it. Its likely that its all bunched in together. Looking at material with a critical eye is a positive feature of HN not a negative - thats a very very nuanced thing to evaluate though and likely we do not have the technology
> The comment I'm writing right now is critical, but is it "negative?" I certainly don't mean it that way.
It's a matter of perspective. The OP is a negative post. You are negative about it. Therefore, you have made a positive post.
Complaining is easy. And even when you complain, and someone comments to give another perspective that is not necessarily seen as a rebuke.
But posting something positive and getting slammed in the comments? That's depressing. So the barrier to posting something positive seems higher.
>most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic.
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.
Salty but not mean is how I put it
There’s a lot of pedantry as well
I have seen pretty toxic comments in many political threads. Specially in threads of political that have nothing to do with technology in any way.
BTW even being the least toxic leaves the bar still pretty low, if you ask me.
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.
We could have positive discourse on polarized subjects, but the forum doesn't want that. We are artificially limited here in many ways. If the forum were changed, it could be a lot easier to direct conversations in a constructive way. But it's currently designed for mass-appeal and engagement.
Not so off topic. About 2 weeks ago, I commented in such an article saying I humbly don’t think is an appropriate topic for HN, and I was downvoted to hell in a hurry…
Less toxic than Twitter and clones for sure.
Exactly the kind of standard I love to hold myself to. :D
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.
In my opinion; the technical critique is often thin, an edge case at most, or something overly pedantic; solely to make a negative claim.
“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.
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.
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.
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
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! :)
>drowns in veiled toxicity
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
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.
Do you consider yourself an ideologue, an honest propagandist? I do for myself, I don't profess any particular devotion to these ideals of rhetoric or debate. I just consider them tools to accomplish goals, that may be laid aside at will or need. I think frankly most people here also do they just don't admit it.
It really bums me out that you’re apparently still rate-limited, I always appreciate a giraffe-lady thread.
Except when its political talk in any way, which we try to avoid, but when it bleeds through from time to time, it can be all over the place on HN.
I believe Nat Friedman said "pessimists sound smart, optimists make money." It's certainly much easier to give a snarky/negative take and shoot an idea down than think creatively about how to make it work. Also, negative people are perceived as smarter!
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/002210...
That sounds like survivor bias.
It's very important to filter out bad ideas.
It's also important to not filter out the wrong ideas.
It is important to filter ideas, but being reflexively negative like a large portion of HN is just isn't productive. To quote my manager from years ago back when I was still an IC - "I know there are problems - tell me solutions". The whole point of constructive criticism is to start a dialogue in good faith.
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.
You disparage the negativity as "reflexive", but isn't whether the negativity is warranted more important than the pace at which it is delivered, or some oblique critique of its motivation? This looks like an attempt to smear the negativity. Your critique as HNers as not being qualified also looks like an ad hominem argument.
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.
Add in that optimists live longer.
No doubt he was making this claim in a business context, but I wish it wasn't framed in financial terms. Our culture is already too obsessed with money, falsely framing it as the measure of the good life and of human worth. What an impoverished, boring, and frankly nihilistic and horrifying worldview.
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).
As a counter point - every couple I ever ran across in divorce court getting raked over the coals seemed to have at least one delusional optimist in the mix.
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!
Another problem I'm starting to see lately is accounts on Reddit posting vague positive comments to farm karma, make the accounts look real, run cover for other AI posts from the same account, etc. I'd love to see a world where we have more positive comments on articles but positivity on a post is starting to be a weak (but growing) spam indicator!
Reddit is more toxic than even Facebook to be honest. I've posted something just in discovery questions for something I'm building and immediate was banned from the group. First time on Reddit, first time in that group.
Has happened in two other same type situations. Find it super territorial and toxic TBH.
You just issued a complaint and that's a fact. In the context of "complaints are bad, m'kay" how do you feel about this?
Negative posts that I post tend to do better than neutral or positive ones. I have a classifier that judges titles on "most likely to get upvoted" for which "Richard Stallman is Dead" is the optimal title, and another that judges on "likely to have a comments/vote ratio > 0.5" [1]. The first one is a crummy model in terms of ROC, the second is pretty good and favors things that are clickbaity, about the battle of the sexes, and oddly, about cars.
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
Hi, appreciate your comment. The sampling is from all posts / comments over the past 35 days, accessed via the API (https://github.com/philippdubach/hn-archiver). There might be a skew to sample higher voted posts first (i.e. if there is high volume posts and comments with zero upvotes don't make it into the database) so that would explain the high ration. I will definitely look into it before publishing the paper - this is exactly the feedback I was hoping for publishing the preprint. Thanks for pointing this out! Would love to see the mentioned classifier. If you find the time please reach out to the email on the page or on bluesky.
This is factually incorrect. There’s no way that you are sampling ALL posts and comments because otherwise the average would not be 35 points. The vast majority of posts get no upvotes.
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.
Thanks for the pushback this is exactly the kind of peer review I was hoping for at the preprint stage. You are likely correct regarding the sampling bias. While the intent was to capture all. posts, an average score of 35 suggests that my archiver missed a significant portion of the zero-vote posts (likely due to my workers API rate limits or churn during high-volume periods). This created a survivorship bias toward popular posts in the current dataset, which I will explicitly address and correct.
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.
You're right that a simple Python script would be more cost-effective for this kind of archiving. I went with workers because I was already familiar with the stack and wanted real-time processing, but for a research project focused on completeness rather than latency, your approach makes much more sense - please reach out if you want to offer your help. Initially I was planning on building a public realtime dashboard and might as well still do.
Interestingly, this is the kind of negative feedback that your post implies is bad. Thank goodness for negative feedback!
> "most likely to get upvoted" for which "Richard Stallman is Dead" is the optimal title
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..
> What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs. The usual. It’s worth noting that technical critique reads differently than personal attacks; most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic.
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 making a distinction the paper should address more directly. The classifier can't tell the difference between "this API design is fundamentally flawed because X" and "this company is terrible" (as noted in an earlier reply). Both register as negative by models trained on reviews and social media.
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've seen the same with comments (both negative sentiment and shorter length). Short, snarky, negative comments [0] normally get a much better response than well-reasoned, longer-form comments.
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
>It's frustrating that better content is not always rewarded
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.
I do have a blog [0] that I occasionally (I think I’m averaging once a year haha) post to. And it’s possible that trying to create better content has the opposite effect, though I’m prouder of the stuff I put more thought/effort into so even if it results in worse content for others, it’s something I want to put my name on.
I was not suggesting that quality is inversely proportional to effort, but that could be true on this heterogeneous medium. Targeting a spread audience requires disproportional effort to soften ideas and not offend and put off. Done right, the "good" content will be polished and blend in, not getting noticed. While superficial this is obvious, designing content to be positive is designing it to be invisible. I don't think this applies to a blog because the audience was designed, whoever found the content already has a good number of characteristics you can assume. Incentives on hacker news are very pervasive and it is designed, literally, to relay a particular kind of narrative: more power to the middle man, if the middle man is backed by the good guys.
Ty for the blog reference, will check it for sure.
I have 104872 karma on HN. You may find https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders and https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments interesting. However, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to sort one's own comments by ranking. One of these days I'm going to scrape mine and see if I can write the "rules of HN" for highly upvoted comments.
One is: HN does not like jokes, unless you put an explanation in the comment as well.
Hmm, I went looking for a comment [0] I made "sometime last year" talking about what does/doesn't get upvoted on HN, I finally found it, I made the comment 9 years ago (I literally stared at the date for a good few minutes, I thought it was much more recent) where I did a short analysis on my own comments over the previous 2 years (at that time) which sort of shows the opposite of what I've said (reviewing the comments I linked), only a few of them were short/snarky/pithy, most were not novels but were a little more fleshed out.
That said, I haven't done sentiment analysis on those or more recent comments but my guess is that "negative" comments get more upvotes
I thought I had read you had 1048576 of karma and thought: what a coincidence: 1 megabyte worth of karma.
BTW, this comment is supposed to be joke-ish.
I've certainly noticed the same. I have two accounts here, a main one, and one that I use as a throwaway for occasional personal/emotional, off-topic, or snarky comments. The latter has roughly 4x the comment-per-karma ratio at the moment.
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.
Longer content isn’t always better. There is something to brevity. Anyone can make a point with 2,000 words, but it takes writing and editing skill to make that same point and have the same impact with 20 words.
I agree, longer does not mean better and I'll be the first to tell you I can be long-winded but it's because often there is a lot of nuance and I want to make my point as explicit as I can and leave little room for misunderstanding.
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.
Thank you for pointing that out.
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?)
I’ve felt the same way with social media in general. It’s about managing your resources. In this case it’s your time.
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.
Engineers are employed to fix problems, so they have an inherent disposition to break things down into pieces to identify what's working and what's not working. I've had the opportunity to demo our engineering tools to professionals at industry-type events, and they all came to our booth with arms crossed, even before they understood our value proposition. We demoed the exact same tools to the maker space and everyone who came to the booth was flowing with positive energy. Basically a glass half-empty vs half-full type of experience.
> What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs.
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 read the pre published PDF but don't really see stand what we were supposed to take from this blog post in particular.
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.
> Also am I basically fullfiling the blog post prophecy?
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.
We self filter for negative responses because negative content is functionally interactive whereas positive content is functionally complete. Agreement is silent, users keep scrolling if they agree. Disagreement demands expression. Just a theory I don’t have data to back this up.
Not only that, but a positive comment that adds nothing is frowned upon ("that's what the upvote button is for!") which negatively selects such comments.
Thus comments are mostly neutral, objective facts that add upon the original comment, or negative comments of disagreement.
I definitely think you're onto something. Also, we're inherently psychologically biased toward negative content because all the monkeys who ignored the scary things died.
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.
You're right! Oh, wait....
Ah, nothing can beat that old combo of ranting and/or correcting someone on the Internet.
As an ESL person one of the first internet-related terms I learned was "flamewar".
EDIT: ESL -> English as a Second Language
ESL?
"English as a Second Language" would be my guess, but I've never seen that used as an abbreviation
It's a very common abbreviation for that
It's what they call (called?) the school programs in USA.
We have that in Canada too
Sorry, edited for clarity.
PS: I learned that acronym less than a year ago, so maybe it is not as used as I thought.
It's pretty common, but I guess just for English people (or maybe just in Canada as hinted in another post?)? Either way I'm all for eliminating acronyms in public posts!
It's very common the US as well, but primarily in education circles. I honestly have no idea what percent of the general public would recognize it immediately (hard to know for anything, really).
Ha, technically correct but also a little nitty. "First" and "second" are colloquial used here as "main" and "other." But again, you're not wrong.
"Subsequent Language"? "Successor Language"? "Secondary Language"?
Feel like there is an "S" word that works
English second language
English for Speakers of other Languages
You’re likely thinking of TESOL, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. ESL is English as a Second Language.
The value I get from negative comments is usually higher.
My usual journey: I visit the comment section and then look for the first top comment that criticizes the core thesis of the article.
If i find an article online, ill sometimes pass it through a HN search to see any issues with it.
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.
What would LLM's make of normal human conversations if they had access to everything you say (Just wait!)? Think back to the last time you hung out with a group of friends, either in person or online. How much of what was said would an AI bin into positive, negative, or neutral categories?
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.
Negative bias has been observed in all forms of media. What would be unusual and newsworthy would be if hacker news was an exception to this.
No one wants to spend time writing "I agree", mostly they move on or give an upvote. Doesn't look like TFA counts upvotes as we don't see them.
Somtetimes people write "This", and that's apparently a no-no. You are told to just upvote.
The counterargument is that, if you think a post is idiotic, you could say so but, if you don't articulate why in detail, you'll probably be downvoted or modded. So better to just downvote if you care and move on.
I agree.
The depressing thing is how some forums like StackOverflow actually ban "thank you" comments. It makes the world a more heartless place.
From an evolutionary standpoint, which circumstances should a thinking being prioritize to best ensure its safety and survival? Should it seek out "positive sentiment" and seek to avoid "negative sentiment" (even though this likely doesn't mean evading negative circumstances merely avoiding the sentiment until it is too late)?
Negative bias is probably inevitable in cognition itself.
A lot of people are commenting on the conclusion but I'm surprised no one is commenting on the methodology? The distributions given by the models seem weird. The LLM's enough so that I would just discount those and focus on the BERT models, but even then roBERTa for instance seems to suggest there is NO positive sentiment, with only scores of 0.5 and above given. Then there is the axis which is "ai_sentiment" against the classification, but it's not clear what "ai_sentiment" is, and it's not expanded upon in the paper. It seems to basically just map to the DistilBERT score apart from a few outliers?
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).
Fair point, `ai_sentiment` should have been defined explicitly. It's the production score from DistilBERT-base-uncased-finetuned-sst-2-english, the same model family as Cloudflare's sentiment classifier. That explains the r=0.98 correlation you noticed. And you're right that the models disagree. This isn't measurement error though. They learned different definitions of "sentiment" from their training data. DistilBERT was trained on movie reviews (SST-2), so it asks "is this evaluating something as good or bad?" BERT Multilingual averages tone across 104 languages, which dilutes sharp English critique. RoBERTa Twitter was trained on social media where positivity bias runs strong, hence the μ=0.76 you see.
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.
I find it hard to mark something as negative when it's valid criticism. I'm of the opinion that if you cannot handle criticism, then you can't put yourself out there. This is coming from someone that is having a hard time putting themselves out there because I know I'm going to be wrong on certain topics.
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
> What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs. The usual. It’s worth noting that technical critique reads differently than personal attacks; most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic.
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!
Negativity Bias is a thing. It probably served us well back when it was more important to remember to avoid the field with all the poison snakes in it vs the field with the pretty flowers in it, but in an era where algo feeds try to treat content equally, and optimize for attention, it kind of ruins everything.
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?
> What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs. The usual. It’s worth noting that technical critique reads differently than personal attacks; most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic.
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.
To try and overcome my own personal tendency towards negative criticism on HN, I try and reframe my comments from "why this won't work" to "how can we make this work".
Not a panacea, and I'd be interested to hear others ideas on how to better comment and give feedback.
Maybe try this heuristic: If the content is something you understand well or are passionate about, give merit to its core idea and expand upon it. If the content is something you do not understand well, ask questions that address what you believe is your fundamental gap in understanding the core idea. Not everyone writes perfectly, so be charitable and assume that other parts of the content may not be as thorough.
> most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic
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.
You said it well. It can be an intellectual dialogue only when we talk on different sides and do not agree all the time. I am actually agreeing here, making this a positive comment, and did not contribute anything :)
Related threads on overwhelmingly negative comments: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40430263 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32400521
Because wisdom stems from burnt hands, and wisdom is extremely valuable. Positivity simply has a lower value to the reader. Maybe we should create good.news.ycombinator.com and see how much less interesting it becomes?
This is not the case.
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.
I think Buffet said it best: "You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you do not do too many things wrong."
I think part of this is human nature - we love to complain. Discontent tends to be a motivator we'll try to do something about (i.e. write a post), often moreso than when we're content.
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.
What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs. The usual. It’s worth noting that technical critique reads differently than personal attacks; most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic
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.
Isn't this what one would expect? Not least because when something is "as expected or better" people rarely feel the urge to express that. But when something goes wrong we tend to be more ... communicative.
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.
I bet for most of us there’s a baseline positivity to everyday life that, because of how durable it is, is not really considered news. Thus newsworthy topics tend to skew negative.
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.
> 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.
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.
Being grumpy and critical is rightly a virtue in the tech community at large, and this serves as a good counterbalance to the astroturfed positivity and marketing pushed by companies.
Ironically, I suspect this article’s title would rightly be evaluated as negative in sentiment analysis.
I want this same analysis with more nuance about what negativity means. He mentions in the post that “technical criticism” counts as negativity.
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$$”
Both are negative statements, but it doesn’t make sense to group them together.
Like…is this comment itself a “negative” comment? Maybe. But I want the author to improve and I think most people here do too…and that’s where HN really shines.
Yes, probably the core limitation of my analysis (see earlier comment). My classifiers are treating "I don't like React because I don't want to write HTML in my JavaScript" the same as "React sux a$$" and that's clearly wrong. The models I'm using were built for general sentiment analysis, not technical discourse. On a meta level, your comment itself is a perfect example - it's "negative" in that it criticizes my methodology, but it's exactly the kind of feedback that I was hoping for, so thanks!
I would love to see this analyzed with more than just positive/negative. My assumption would be that high energy posts outperform, regardless of sentiment swing. That is, enthusiastic probably does well, too?
Similarly, how does inquisitive perform?
Open to the Idea, how exactly would you classify "high energy posts" ?
I had the same thoughts (high-energy). I would have worded it slightly differently -- more engaging posts.
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.
I don't know of any definitive classification for this. Probably easiest to begin with looking for passive versus active verbs? Run on sentences are usually bad, as well. Though, too many short sentences can effectively be a run on paragraph. :D
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.)
Isn’t this the major takeaway from the entire social media era of the last 20 years? Content that triggers strong emotions, especially anger, fear, and moral outrage, reliably increases engagement.
See also:
This suggests HN is functioning as designed. Votes signal agreement while comments surface disagreement.
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.
People usually complain when they are not happy but do not praise when they are. It's unsurprising most comments are negative.
I hate your tone, just as much as autoreferential irony.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to deliver this message, you've been indispensable to its creation.
"There is a bush over there" is not news.
"There is a bush with berries over there" is news.
"There is a tiger in that bush over there" is adrenaline inducing huge news.
Hierarchy and plurality are essential properties of any functioning information space.
- 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...
When everything is perfect, there is less to complain about. So this is only logical. You simply have fewer points to note when things are excellent.
Analysing perfection yields not much compared to analysing crap.
We used to make fun of cat videos and low quality memes albeit they kind of balance the negative sentiment one is exposed on almost all platforms and topics. From word politics, AI/tech, environmental, personal health etc.
Good. Should be higher. Positive comments are most often worthless.
controversy algorithm is real - reddit and twitter both prioritize controversial posts since they get people engaging.
Its called discourse, and its healthy.
Would be interesting to see this kind of analysis on youtube comments.
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.
This is why the news wants us angry at each other. Politics is a perfect carrot for this for engagement and keeping the ad revenue flowing. They only succeed if people are engaged.
Should constructive feedback or contradictory viewpoints really be seen as negative sentiment? When reading the comment section of an article I would like to understand any nuances or shortcomings of something.
Furthermore, there should be a difference between a contradictory viewpoint and something that is truly negative.
https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart
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.
So should we stop being cynical and start writing "You're absolutely right!"
Critique is not necessarily a bad thing, and the author doesn't advocate for any change. It's just an observation. There is such a thing as toxic positivity as well, and if I'm not mistaken there's even a setting for the tone in ChatGPT to get rid of it.
BREAKING: “HN is negative” confirmed by numbers!! I didn’t even had to read the article to know that (tbf maybe I'm part of the problem)
All I can I say is that I come to HN for the feedback. The critique is where much of the learning happens. That seems like a posotive outcome on the whole.
Don’t they mean contrarian?
Say, this is not a negative comment but may be interpreted to have a negative sentiment due to disagreement with their core thesis.
Complete hogwash. I would never reflexively comment negatively on articles shared here before even opening them.
HN is a beautiful lesson on the hard limits of a contrarian's usefulness.
well people doesn't just comment to say thanks or appreciation.
Mostly people only comment when there's something wrong
Curious if SOTA models would have the same sentiment? Probably, but they are capable of more context and nuance. The reason I ask is the post seems focused on models you can run locally.
Hacker News is universally read by cynics and skeptics. Hopefully, that was negative enough.
I find it humoring that this article inadvertently contributes to its statistic
Negative engagement should be a negative metric and bring negative karma to posters and commenters that take part in it.
HN is where nerds come to complain with other nerds
I come to HN to see negative comments. I pay special attention to very downvoted ones. My algorithm is: if there is no ad hominem, really bad words, or snarky, I read them fully and with attention. Of course if is a non sequitor I would leave it.
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…
Everyone likes a good sneer. Makes us feel better.
I didn't read the preprint, but what does negative sentiment mean? Does that question I just asked qualify, because it is critical?
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.
Is a HN post complaining about negativity in HN, negative?
CGP Grey did a fantastic short video titled 'This Video Will Make You Angry'[1]. I'd recommend that anyone who is interested in this thread take a watch.
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...
Really cool experiment Phillip, thanks for sharing!
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
Thanks! And appreciate you sharing the Harris clip. I sometimes listen to his meditations: https://philippdubach.com/posts/gratitude
Glad you enjoy Sam too!
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.
Love a good rant or an artfully scathing review!
I wonder how HN front page would look like with positive ones only.
I've had a project in the queue to hook up a sentiment analyzer to an RSS reader/Mastodon/AT protocol client to make negative posts and negative people disappear. My basic trouble with that sort of thing is that those things can harvest much more negativity than my nervous system can handle.
The top comment here is as HN as it gets: “Yeah, but we are better than Reddit.”
Good job.
Sort by controversial. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
Just need to find the right scissor statement to really get the debate going.
Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. Taking the easy way and being sceptical means you'll be mostly right because most things don't work out.
Well who would have thought that negativity attracts more discussion. Unfortunately this is also where mainstream media has been going for a while..
> What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs.
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.
This was a really cleaver post to create the most comments of the sentiment mentioned. I am really impressed how well it is working and would like to know more.
I prefer those negative comments like I prefer negative reviews on sites like Amazon.
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
Anger sells... but who's buying?
Negative "Sentiment" aka a black box made a frownie face.
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.
Is this positive or negative news?
If I would guess, I'd say 65% positive, 35% negative
This is such a boring post to be #1 on Hacker News.
Should have made it more negative..
The 2025 Oxford Word of the Year was rage bait
https://corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-i...
I believe another factor specific for HN is the inability to downvote forces people to respond in negative light.
The most controversial submissions always have a tighter comment to upvote ratio.
The most controversial comments tend to be the most replied to.
dang's explanation sums it up nicely:
> 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!]
We focus on negative outcomes because that relates directly to survival. Our brains are wired for it. Talking about negative outcomes means we learn about them and have a better chance of avoiding them. Plus, the fear response is much stronger and lasts longer than the happy / joy response.
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.
Including this one.
I think the mind is drawn to negativity, because happiness and positivity rarely explode in ways that end us and our ability to reproduce. Thus we have evolved to be more aware of negativity.
Tech has changed focus from the typical HN expert to more mainstream users. And the HN expert does not like it. So that is why we are so negative. We see products shut down and we get unhappy. We see problems and we try to solve them. Or at least talk about them.
I'd like to make two points about this:
-----
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.
-----
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.
Now let's check the comments and see when and by how much they have become negative.
I'd attribute at least some of that to HN users being weighted toward engineering-ish jobs. "Major Outage at US-East-1" news is something we are paid to pay far more attention to than "All is Well at US-East-1".
Everybody likes a horror movie.
What a load of nonsense.
This makes me MAD AS HELL
Possibly related: In the last year or two, I find myself downvoting far more than I used to. I see far more comments that are personal attacks (at least borderline), ideological battle, arguing but with no actual substance, or just bizarre comments that don't actually make any sense.
Did HN get overrun by trolls, shills, and bots? Or did I just get more cranky?
I noticed the same thing in the last year. Tons of Reddit and 4chan colonists. Both generally lack any kind of technical background and flood to any thread remotely adjacent to politics.
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.
I have seen that as well. HN is now a typical talking point on many tech sites. More people are becoming aware. So we are getting grumpy reddit users and twitter users (after the purchase of X).
This doesn't necessarily mean anything. It takes a real fool to make baseless assumptions about how much of something there should be, for no good reason.
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.)
Captain obvious. That is why negative, controversial etc. material in newspapers sells more
Now measure the performance of Hacker News posts about Hacker News posts.
Hi philipp (in case you're reading this),
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 ;).
Hi I'm trying to catch up to the comments but definitely appreciate this! I wrote a worker that uses the public API to archive all post and comments and create regular snapshots to track growth etc (https://github.com/philippdubach/hn-archiver). I will upload a newer version of the code and dataset when I publish the paper. And I will clarify the source as you noted. Thanks again! If you find the time please reach out to the email on my page or on bluesky (new there) very interested to discuss the "effect" you mentioned.
Okay, I'll reach out.
Btw, excellent work!
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OT: Is Cloudflare breaking the internet again?
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
I don't see any issues on my side
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!
Some more testing reveals that it's uBlock Origin causing the problem. Disabling the plug-in for the site means Firefox no longer displays an error.
I'm running Firefox 146.0.1 (aarch64) on MacOS and don't have this issue.
The cynical doomerism of reddit is like an infectious disease that ensnares you in their pit of misery with it's initial blast of catharsis. People whose lives bring them out of that swamp leave reddit and stop contributing, so it's mainly populated with miserable cynical doomers all jerking each other off about how screwed they are. Most of them are teenage/college kids working bottom rung jobs/entry level work/unemployed, with all the naivete that comes with it. Stay away from it.
their cynicism is perfectly understandable once you correctly identified the demographics (which you did), so I'm not sure why you're holding pessimism against poor people with a bleak future; like it or not that's far more anchored in reality than anything around these parts, as there are far more people with "bottom rung jobs" than software developers and VC investors in the bay area.
Most people in the US begin life poor, and most of them are not poor forever. I wouldn't call this a "bleak future". I was definitely poor when I was 18, but I wasn't pessimistic. Pessimism at such a young age is almost always a mistake.
> Most people in the US begin life poor, and most of them are not poor forever
Thank heavens young Americans can look forward to a $63k/year median income.
You can develop pessimism without a conscious choice, but once you become aware of how negative your outlook is, it's a conscious choice to not try to do better.
The subtext is that most Redditors have significantly better lives than 90% of people on Earth.
Life is bleak if you perceive it to be bleak.
In my experience, this depends a lot on the subreddits you are subscribed to. Even in that set, the general mood sometimes changes significantly over time, e.g. because moderators change, a flood of new people is coming in because of some trends (AI), or some reddit meta events (eg a post being bestoffed). Generally speaking, a few vocal asshles can spoil your subreddit and drag the overall sentiment down.
The assholes on reddit aren't the problem, often they are the people who are closest to breaking free from the swamp (yes, some are just assholes).
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.
Cynical doomerism isn't limited to low pay jobs. Another super negative place is Team blind, where a lot of contributors are extremely well-paid.
I don't use Blind often, but whenever I do I always feel better about my job afterwards. Yeah, there are definitely parts about my job that suck, but at least it's not that bad.
My original home on the internet is metafilter, where I've been a member since 2001. For an extremely long time, it was the internet's best kept community, imo. Unfortunately, it also seems to be falling into pure doomerism, especially as the user base has declined over the last few years. The overall population is definitely on the older side at this: I was one of the younger users 25 years ago, and probably still am.
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.
As someone who’s on Reddit a lot, I completely agree
I was chronically on reddit daily from when Digg collapsed until they pulled the API. I was long overdue to leave by that point anyway.
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.
I am very much in the same boat. I still browse every now and then, and now it feels like I can spot a redditor from two opinions/values in a conversation. It's definitely turned more mainstream and more indoctrinating. If Fox News turned our parents political, reddit is doing it to our generation.
The worst is going on any city's subreddit. You will think it is a terrible place with the worst drivers, crime, terrible schools, no jobs, and loneliness. And if you try to contradict that with some positivity you will get attacked.
Country specific subs aren't better either. They slowly changed from comfy places to talk about laid back topics to a full on brigaded cesspool where only the most polarizing opinion thrive.
Why would young people with dismal economic perspectives and a poisoned political system possibly be miserable? That doesn't take too much to understand.
They’re miserable because they think this way. They think this way because they spend time with others spreading cynicism. Dismal economic perspectives and a poisoned political system is a point of view and a talking point and in reality not true for most people. If you know even a little bit about history you likely won’t have this perspective. Get off social media and look around at real life and you’ll see all sorts of great things!
You are very good at using a lot of words to say absolutely nothing.
Reddit literally is what you make of it. Unlike HN.
Controversial content is discussed more than positive one, that's a well known phenomenon from gossiping with friends to discussing politics online to whatever.
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.
I'm tired of this point being repeated. This is not universally true. I'm in communities where the more active discussions are not ragebait.
I'd say HN's problem is rooted in that many folks participate in malicious contrarianism.
There's a lot of scientific evidence that negative and controversial content has multiple psychological effects of high emotional arousal, triggers the confrontation effect and toxicity breeds retention.
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.
That’s a factor, but the Reddit hive mind can take even non-controversial posts and turn them into a toxic, cynical cesspool of comments.
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.
There's a saying : No News is Good news.
Unfortunately "No News" doesn't make for a very good website.
It depends on the platform. Most of the platforms reward content engagement, no matter if the content is positive or negative.
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.
> These points have utility: the more points you have, the more credibility you have on this platform and capacity to push a story.
<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.
This is hilarious, particularly the last sentence.
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.
You can have millions of upvotes just with jokes.
I remember a guy that had millions just because on any reddit AMA asked "tits or ass?"
I believe the only threshold that might warrant karma-farming on HN is 100 points? Is that when you can actually downvote? After that karma was certainly not on my radar.
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.
I like to defend the devil here as well, because I see it as an interesting challenge / puzzle. It is very intellectually motivating and difficult to find compelling arguments that can move someone's opinion. Like verbal judo.
Just checked, 1 point can upvote but not downvote
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.
> and there is practically no downsides if you upset anyone
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.
I don't think YC startups need to sneak to promote their startups - they can just ask the moderators to give them a boost.
Meanwhile if you say anything bad about capitalism the comment is removed.
> Meanwhile if you say anything bad about capitalism the comment is removed.
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 am genuinely none sure.
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.
One thing I've noticed over the decades here: anti-capitalism used to get you flagged to death in the past... but since Covid and especially since the Russian invasion and associated price shocks / cost-of-living crisis, it takes a lot to even get downvoted.
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.
"you're posting too fast; please slow down"
A 45/65 balance feels like it's at the optimal balance for interesting. Users are expected to continually upvote more and more boring posts if the user pool grows with noise. If the system stabilizes to 50/50, the content would trend toward mediocre but harmless.. Ergo, HN really is a cut above social media.
I personally only really noticed that I did not like the "after dark" style reddits. But I would generally try to ignore anything political, and focus on like craft/hobby content, media (but not tabloid style), and things not a commentary.
Reddit (or socially generated sites) are really a mixed bag.
I think what became interesting and I nailed down with others was any hobby forum became toxic and lost its utility in direct correlation with its popularity.
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.
Same, and what made me finally quit reddit for good was realizing that on a given r/all page I was blocking 98+% of the content, to the point where it made me question why I am even bothering.
Unrelated but I still use rif daily. You can patch the apk using Revanced to use your own API key rather than the original developer's key. With the rise of AI, I've block a bunch of subreddits that have become infected with obvious engagement bait posts all with similar structures, writing styles, and tropes.
"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.
What! You can still use rif like that? That's interesting. I completely stopped browsing Reddit on my phone after it went away (though maybe that's for the best...)
I switched to RedReader, which Reddit decided to still allow.
I went through a similar process recently mostly by hand and found the same result. After blocking negative vibes, my only "subs" were intentionally "wholesome" subs like animals/feel good news etc.
>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 also found it a very good thing. After the API use ban, and losing my blocklist, I couldn't go back to browsing normal reddit anymore and was finally able to quit after 10+ years. And, it has made me very resistant to joining or doomscrolling any other social media too. I think the hn model is decent because it doesn't optimize for engagement but for intellectual curiosity, whether it's positive or negative, which leads to mostly earnest and interesting discussion.
Had the same experience with rif/res, and on X. If you go into algorithm-heavy sites with the intention of actively curating your personalized algorithm into your areas of interest, the sites can work quite well. One click blocking of subreddits and topics/posters sends strong feedback to the algorithm to readjust. I really don't know how people can use sites in any other way. For YouTube, I have filters and blockers set up such that I don't even get recommended any videos, and don't see any videos to click on unless I type in a search query or receive a notification from a channel to which I am intentionally subscribed. Facebook was/is broken beyond all repair, though. I recall that you could not remove posts from random groups and people from your feed, even if you were not friends with them or members of those groups.
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.
I didn't mean to imply that I find all positive content boring — just the kind of positive content that would rise to /r/all in reddit at that time, which was mostly quickly digestable content (like animal pictures). And it was also boring in the sense that it was much "slower" to change within a day than the unfiltered /r/all, so I would largely see the same content for a lot longer.
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.
Most ideas are bad, so maybe negativity should be common?
To meta-steelman: if one steelmans a bad take, then the negativity becomes even more valuable.
It's probably not a good approach to life though. Most bad ideas aren't really worth arguing about, better to focus on the good ideas, or at least the finding common ground with the good intentions behind bad ideas.
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.
I disagree. Life is a tightrope of limited duration and small missteps can be disastrous. Take risks, but tilt the odds in your favor by making the optimism as pruned by correct negativity as possible. Do not waste time optimistically on something that has little chance of success, or that has already demonstrably failed. Above all, do not get trapped wishfully believing in things that are wrong.
I generally agree. Offline (ask my family) I'm Pollyanna.
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.)
What do you call the people who provide commentary on e.g. live sports? Oddly we don't use that word for people who leave internet comments, but it seems like it would fit pretty well.
(See also: commentariat)
> 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?
I cut people a lot slack that might be dealing with a lot of negative issues in their head. If they want to drop out and spend the next year hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, cut off from the outside world, I'm going to respect their choices.
Most things are inedible, yet we treat food poisoning as unacceptable event. Places serving expired food get shut down. Yet preparing speech and sights we feed others is a lost art. When I read how people wrote 100 years ago I feel like a brute
I'm very confused by this analogy.
Not the OP, but I'll try to unpack it for you.
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.
That’s a fair point, but I think we can distinguish between critical thinking and negativity.
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.’
I like your attitude.
I think this is a common view, but it assumes that most of one's negative hot takes are good. And frankly, I've seen HNers being confidently wrong more times than I can count.
I feel like this goes back to the "trick" of getting your questions about Linux answered. Basically, if you just asked your question "How do I do X on Linux?", you'd get no response. But if you said "Windows is so much better than Linux because I can't even do X on Linux", you'd get 5 different ways to accomplish your task before the end of the day.
Nothing gets people engaged more than making them angry.
I feel ironically obliged to mention Cunningham's Law
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
So a nice bubble? :) ( I actually mean that positive )
nit: 35%
I did something similar and ended up opening only /r/AskHistorian posts...
Unironically, how are history-related questions not negative? I’d imagine people would ask questions about some dark events.
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
If you block /r/history, you would prove the aphorism, "One thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history"
If you had a no tolerance policy then overtime you ban every single sub. 99.99% positive would still mean they could get banned, under this algorithm.
You're also comparing Apples to Oranges by comparing zero tolerance records for subs vs average across all posts of hn.