Ask HN: Where is the Hostility on HN Coming From?
Jut take a look at this thread that is proposing NOT implementing a new design for Wikipedia. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4352290 The presentation is very polite but the HN'feedback'? Woah!
The responses even from veteran HNers is nothing short of shocking. I can mildly 'understand' harsh responses from people whose present jobs are to design Wikipedia however, the extremely harsh responses from others is not constructive and leads to no learning whatsoever both for the designers and others.
This post is just an example of the latest trend of a new and unusually hostile HN.
Not cool.
160 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 522 ms ] threadSlow down people. These people put a ton of work into a project which is really cool. They deserve constructive criticism.
If you're frustrated about the general status quo, some people will become extremely vocal, and use language to stand out in the crowd and have their opinion be heard. Venting alone becomes therapeutic to them, because it's their way to contribute to the process.
...until they need to do it again in the next thread.
The designers should take this as valuable input, ignore the subjective comments, and move on to create greater things.
It was just design for the sake of design - it didn't need to be based on a MediaWiki theme or anything like that. It's just a visual representation of what 'could be'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return
All of this has happened before, and will happen again.
Added to that a certain attitude of 'just because I'm right, I can be mean'
All just leads to an environment where trying new things is discouraged. The guy didn't follow the status quo, he tried something different. What happened wasn't quite a pitch fork smack down, but it felt pretty mean spirited.
I certainly didn't see anything constructive in the comments.
That said...
I responded to the OP who seemed to be making a general observation, based on a particular post. My reply was to be in generalisation too, so it may not be a correct view of the state of HN
Maybe usability studies, A/B test results and if at all possible some form of prototype, even if it is just static.
Plus the article lacks consideration for mobile and small screen platform (i.e. considering edge cases). In fact I'd go as far as to say it actively disregards them by choosing gigantic fonts and lots of useless whitespace in favor of useful content.
People who keep using that phrase as an excuse to hate on anything designed that they don't like are the truly revolting people.
Stifling discussion, silencing opinions, and perpetuating engineer-elitism.
This is the problem. The MSM is full of hyperbole. One nice thing about HN is that it is rarely rewarded here.
You could have said:
People are hostile to that posting because it talks down to its readers by being a gigantic infographic. It could have been explained in a few paragraphs of text. Also, the idea appears to be made by people with a preference for form over function. Therefore it has little practical merit.
It would have made the same point, without the hostility or hyperbole.
Personally, I found the overall idea unrealistic, but it was interesting to see Wikipedia mocked up in another way. Their schematic using the color bars for languages gave me some ideas.
The guy that spends 13 hours a day shovelling fish heads probably thinks that my 9 hours in a chair in front of a screen doesn't really consist of 'real work'.
You can't tell me that you've never wondered if he was right.
P.S. Form over function is not evil.
I must disagree wholeheartedly, all the more regarding a tool as valuable as Wikipedia. As small as I try to keep my identity, this is part of it.
I suspect some of the hostility we're seeing is a delayed reaction to the prevalence of this viewpoint here. HN no longer has consensus about which of the Two Cultures is favored.
Most people have strong feelings about Wikipedia because it has become a big part of many people's internet experience. And people usually don't like change and can become offended when people propose to do so.
I think the Wikipedia article was an emotive exception.
EDIT: Thought I'd add that there were a lot of positive and friendly comments surrounding the Curiosity landing. So I don't feel like the tone of comments is leaning in one particular direction.
Cards on table: I have often avoided replying through fear of people not liking my opinion, regardless of how well thought out it might be. Often only replied if I already know my views are acceptable here. In fact, to get Karma up, I have merely posted agreeable posts. For example, I have noticed that having a go at the MPAA gets lots of up votes. See what happens if you dare argue for the MPAA, you enter down vote hell!!!
That has to be badly wrong, right? Surely its is the worst sort of mob rule and utterly stifles diverse opinion. Is that what HN is all about?
However, I don't know of a better way to do it, so it is better than nothing.
Without the hostility, the submitter might get the idea that hackernews liked the article.
You say the response "is not constructive and leads to no learning whatsoever". I'd like to substantively address the second claim.
The designers learned that their changes were bad. They learned WHY their changes were bad: many responses gave detailed reasons. The submitter learned that their model of what HN likes was wrong. And if the submitter thought this was a good design, they learned their understanding of design is wrong. All the others who read the submission and responses learned a few design pitfalls to avoid. There are whole chapters in books on design that teach less than this.And this is learning from the event itself! What learning could this event LEAD to? I don't know, someone might pick up a book on design?
(As an aside, I didn't address "not constructive". I have a truly marvellous rant on the emptiness of this concept that this comment field is too small to contain.)
Sometimes these redesigns reek of audacity, sometimes they're just not done very well. In any case, hostility is not necessary to make that point. The situation is not so dire that we need to be mean to someone to tell them we don't like something. It's hard to share what you've done with the world, and it's even harder when many people from a community you respect will shit on you in the case you overlook something.
I don't mean to be impolite, but don't try and pass your anger that something has 400 points on hacker news for some sort of tough-love criticism.
It is so sad that people instead choose to criticize the flaws and ignoring the good and valuable ideas just so they can be extra critical.
Work on your communication skills.
Edit: I feel bad getting upvotes for a snarky off-handed comment. So here's what I think: Contrast and compare the comments to thread regarding the hn statistics page. I don't get the feeling the community is critical for being critical's sake at all.
There's no point being nice to people when they present flawed work - that just propagates bad work.
(and my CTO is way harsher on my Pull Requests than anyone has been on the Wiki redesign anyway)
There is a point in being nice, it's part of being sociable. We could have all the best solutions in the world, but if we can't share them in an agreeable way then they are going to be useless
Think of a world where parents mocked their toddlers for presenting them with a anotomically and structurally defective picture of their family and home. Would the child continue to create with happiness or just associate experimentation with negative response?
I'm comparing the act of creating and reviewing. More explicitly I wanted you to think about how a new designer would respond to overly harsh and non-constructive critisim in the early stages of developing their skillset.
Bad work stopped. Niceness maintained.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfwwHa-7Ux8
On another note, I think the lack of a down vote button on submissions might explain this behavior. If a topic is highly polarized/controversial, it might end up on the front page with a lot of up votes even if most HNers would have down voted it. This results in a lot of people venting off in the comments who would have otherwise simply down voted.
Be curious to hear pg's thinking on the absence of downvotes for stories. This particular story was of such low quality, that I wonder if people were really upvoting the discussion as opposed to the original story.
There is a whole world of difference between:
"Hey, did you consider this and that." and "What you have done is rubbish. You did not think"
For heavens sake the presentation ended with "And here we stop. But, hopefully, the discussion begins." http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/
If it was that bad, then you do not upvote it. if it was good enough for a discussion (upvote), then discuss politely.
Not once in the comments did I see an alternative suggestion. even it it was entirely different from what was proposed. It was all condemnation.
At least we can agree Wikipedia can be improved, they made a suggestion. If you cannot constructively improve on what was proposed, then you can avoid polluting it. Or better still propose your own suggestion.
All other things equal I think internet interactions are "weaker" and carry less weight that regular in-person interactions. If I come to your desk and say "good job" or "I think what you did is terribly lame", I'm sure it won't have the same impact that if I wrote it as a comment in some website. I think that's why internet interactions tend to be more polarizing. So I don't think your question is appropriate.
Besides, for many articles linked on HN we don't know whether the creators are ever going to read our comments. I might be a little more gentle and diplomat in a "Show HN" post than in a regular "look what I found in the internet" post.
It is far easier to work with people who are direct and harsh than the people who dance around the matter. You can never trust anything the latter group of people tell you, and so you end up wasting a tremendous amount of time because you have no idea what they actually want because they refuse to actually tell you.
(That said, there is a world of difference between "that is rubbish, you did not think" and "that is rubbish because you did not think about things X, Y and Z". The first is useless, the second is helpful.)
--
Your idea that people must offer alternate suggestions before criticism is ridiculous. If you present your redesign idea to the public and it's terrible, the correct response is "that's not very good, go back and try again", not "that's not very good, therefore I will spend the months required to come up with a non-awful alternative before commenting".
I think that's a terrible and even dangerous attitude - especially when done in public - for several reasons.
Firstly, if you heavily criticize something when many people are watching, it might keep you from receiving balanced feedback. Some people probably liked some of the aspects of the redesign, but with dozens of people in the thread saying how awful it was, they will rather not speak up and talk about what they liked. If you tell a mass of people "X is rubbish and whoever came up with this is stupid", and some more people join in, the others will probably assume they are idiots for liking it and say nothing. As an analogy: When I was younger I really liked a girl in my class but all my friends were going on about how ugly and weird she was, probably because of some kind of social feedback loop. So instead of telling her that I liked her, I started joining in with the "X is stupid" meme because I didn't want to look like a fool in front of my friends. Had they not talked about it in such an extreme way, things might have went differently, but because of the situation, I lost all my courage to admit it to her and my friends.
Secondly, if you mix valid criticism with being a dick about it, people will more likely think that your criticism is less valid since it's easier to just assume you are an asshole. Most people are emotionally attached to their work. If they weren't, their work would probably suck. They'll learn how to handle criticism, but that doesn't mean it won't hurt or demotivate them if you tell them it's rubbish.
Thirdly, there is absolutely no need to ever mention that it's rubbish or awful. All you need to do is to list the points where they failed and maybe give advice on how to improve it. Calling their work rubbish helps nobody and makes you feel smarter and more powerful than you actually are. If you treat people like this, their work will become worse, not better, and at the same time they will probably stop asking you for advice because you can't stop being a dick about it instead of just encouraging them to improve on what they did by giving valid advice.
People aren't just machines that you can tell "this is all awful, throw it away and start over" without hurting their feelings in at least some way. You should learn to use these emotions to steer them in the right direction, not condemn them and call people who express them unprofessional. You'll get a lot further by nicely packaging your criticism.
Obviously people get emotionally attached to their work. I certainly do. But you have to be able to let go of that while you're receiving feedback, or there's no point in you getting any.
Again, to be clear, I would not say "this is rubbish" or "this is awful" while critiquing a design. I would say "this is not working at all because you're ignoring considerations A and B". There are many, many design ideas that just do not work. As a designer, you are much better served by someone telling you "this is not working at all, you need an entirely different approach" than you are by someone trying to hint you towards evolving a design that's based on a faulty premise.
> (That said, there is a world of difference between "that is rubbish, you did not think" and "that is rubbish because you did not think about things X, Y and Z". The first is useless, the second is helpful.)
This is not true. They are both needlessly critical. You can compliment the design aspects you like, ask for issues to be addressed, and nurture ideas all without telling someone their work is rubbish. No matter what else you say, if you criticize my idea as "rubbish" I'm not going to hear anything else you say.
This "tough love" idea of telling people what they did is awful is just terrible advice and please stop spreading it. You don't win people to your way of thinking by telling them they did a bad job. It's plain false.
There's a vast difference between honest feedback and what was in that thread. Publicly taking someone to task for a design experiment is shameful behavior, especially given this community's standards of participation.
(And I say that with the full knowledge that my phrasing will make you less receptive to my argument.)
Environments where you can't discuss mistakes are poisonous. People make mistakes. People do stupid things. If those mistakes are not dealt with directly, they become larger mistakes, and you end up in situations where people don't take minor actions that can prevent disasters because they're afraid that somebody's feelings might be hurt.
As an example, a few years ago the college I was then attending switched from internally managed email to gmail. For a month after the switch, you could log into anyone's email account without a password. This happened in large part because there was a culture of ignoring mistakes, and people who regularly raises issues were branded as "complainers". And so when they were doing the switch, nobody was willing to stand up and say "have we done basic testing?"
There are, of course, times and places where your goal is not offending people, and criticizing them is obviously a bad idea. (Telling a VC "that investment you made a week ago was really dumb" is probably a bad way to get them to invest in your company.) But much of the time, that rule causes many more problems than it solves.
It's also worth noting that phrasing and delivery matter quite a lot, and that's something that's much harder to convey in text. There's a huge difference, as I've said already, between insulting somebody and criticizing their work. The first is not productive--the second can be.
We agree on basically everything you said. You're 100% right that phrasing and delivery matter quite a lot - which, and this is really the most important part, is exactly what the original post was trying to say. The tone and delivery of most of the comments on the original submission was just ridiculously hostile. And when you're giving someone feedback, that tone matters, whether you have to work with the person every day or it's someone you'll never meet.
Version 1: Your reply if fucking stupid, you arrogant bastard, and you successfully made an ass of yourself. Even if your example was relevant, which is not, everyone knows you can't ever get idiots in any IT department to fix something like missing password. Fuck, nobody gets a job in IT in a college department without being terminally brain-dead. You are not smart enough to realize that the right thing to do is go in the server room with an ax, and hope that when they rebuild the system they'll get a clue. Sheesh, you people are the reason we need an Internet license, to prevent folks like you from polluting the web with nonsense.
Version 2: Dear samdk, I fail to see why people would fix the email system faster if you criticize them or make them resent you. You did not provide the details of the story, but I know of a similar case where the problem was fixed in private, technical, and polite e-mails. That case involved early Sun4 systems where everybody could read anybody's screen over the network, so it was relatively critical too... All it took was showing the sysadmin's screen on mine to get things fixed rather rapidly.
> (And I say that with the full knowledge that my phrasing will make you less receptive to my argument.)
This means you write this for yourself and not to fix things. This is the reason why rule #1 is a good rule: it places the other guy in the center. Your ultimate goal in a negotiation is to get the other side to do what you want. This means they are the center of the universe at that moment. You illustrated that very well with your VC example. What makes a VC different from an IT admin? That you think they are more powerful?
Jon Kershaw, who manages killer whales for a leaving, likes to bring the point that if you try to force a killer whale to do something, you end up dead more often than you want. To bring killer whales to do what you want, you need to make them want to.
Back to the story at hand, I liked the new design, except for the J-like capital I and a few details. Yet, I would certainly have remained silent on the thread because of the vocal and needless criticism, which I find a bit low for YC.
"Not once in the comments did I see an alternative suggestion."
The onus isn't on us to spend two months coming up with an alternative suggestion, when we can clearly compare the existing design with their proposal.
If I'd personally spent two months trying to re-invisage Wikipedia, I would certainly have brought that up.
But the firm did not do that, which gives the "project" the hallmarks of a pure PR exercise for the firm (which is what it obviously is).
The reason this matters is that design is very hard to do because of the real constraints that must be met, in terms of existing technology, limited budget, limited time, internal politics, etc. Pretending constraints don't exist can offend people who spend a lot of their (frustrating, hard working) time actually dealing with them.
Compare with book or movie reviews published in newspapers. They frequently give very harsh and sarcastic criticism, and this is considered fair game. The standards of politeness for face-to-face conversations and public commentary are different.
Why can only goodness be cause for discussion? The top comment by tptacek actually goes into a lot of detail about what's wrong with this. That's useful discussion. It's not positive, but I thought his comment was very high-quality discussion, even if the tone was not positive and happy.
You cannot earn any glory in publishing your code if people don't tell the truth. To be pleased by one «I love what you do», you should ready yourself to get a couple of «you are doing crap». Coders are not expected to publish good code at first, they are expected to improve their work through sincere feedbacks. That is our culture.
Social norms are unproductive when it comes to work in cooperation.
The fact that Asperger (sociopaths) are 10 times more prevalent in coding expertise might not help.
Excellency in coding is an aristocracy that needs no excuses and don't fear critics. You shall not fear the fight if you believe in your creation, because good design can stand the assault of the best criticisms.
Social norms are only their to protect a hierarchy of status. Truth protect the hierarchy of competence.
If you are just a hipster searching for a social status based on consensus then flee for this is war against you. THIS IS SPARTA!!!!!
This is not an accurate characterization of Asperger syndrome or the hacker community. Wikipedia offers the following definition:
Sociopathy is the result of social conditioning which leads to a lack of natural human values. It refers strictly to a social condition where a person knows, yet has been socially conditioned to disregard, the intrinsic human values which are believed to be universal.
The somewhat similar characteristic of Asperger syndrome is a lack of demonstrated empathy. In the case of a harsh review of someone's project, this could manifest as statements that are accurate from the author's perspective but do not take in to consideration how they might make the reader feel. I don't think being blunt in a review is a sign of disregarding universal intrinsic human values.
The real point is there are no truly acceptable positive feedbacks if one does not equally express negative feedbacks.
So ... one should not whine for getting flamed even if it is socially unacceptable to discard all this work because that's the path for improving...and later maybe getting praised.
You cannot earn any glory in publishing your code if people don't tell the truth. To be pleased by one «I love what you do», you should ready yourself to get a couple of «you are doing crap». Coders are not expected to publish good code at first, they are expected to improve their work through sincere feedbacks. That is our culture.
Social norms are unproductive when it comes to work in cooperation.
The fact that Asperger (sociopaths) are 10 times more prevalent in coding expertise might not help.
Excellency in coding is an aristocracy that needs no excuses and don't fear critics. You shall not fear the fight if you believe in your creation, because good design can stand the assault of the best criticisms.
Social norms are only their to protect a hierarchy of status. Truth protect the hierarchy of competence.
If you are just a hipster searching for a social status based on consensus then flee for this is war against you. THIS IS SPARTA!!!!!
For what it's worth, I thought it was an interesting and refreshing design proposal, though I did have issues with the way they chose to render logos and use screenspace--it was a bit too kitschy in its minimalism.
This is the internet, it's how it works, it's how it worked since at least Usenet (and probably before, but I can't testify of that). The social norm is different than regular "face to face" conversation.
It's harsher, but it's also often more honest I think.
That's exactly what PG intended HN not to be. It's meant to be different, nicer, better thought out. If it devolves to a common web message board, we lose what makes it special. Read this, if you haven't before. Especially the last paragraph:
http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
In any case, if there's a secret HN where everyone is nicer, sign me up.
As far as that particular Wikipedia thing: I think a lot of people really liked the design, and most of them clicked the upvote. On the other hand, most of the people who didn't like it couldn't downvote so they left comments instead.
So part of the hostility you notice might just be the fact that they took on Wikipedia and really put themselves out there, so it was a controversial post. And HN needs to fix the downvote thing (there I go being negative again).
One other thing is that you have people with really different backgrounds coming to Hacker News. Some people are like me and have a lot of coding experience including, for example, enterprise(y) application programming. Other people have much more experience in marketing and/or graphic design and/or UX/UI.
This might just be another example of me having a bad life, but there also might actually be a bit of pent up resentment between UX/UI designer people and coders in general. I will be too honest as usual and elaborate.
Basically, what it seems like from my own programmer perspective is that the people doing the software UI design in Photoshop or whatever think that they know better how to build software than me and therefore are placing themselves over me in the project decision making, even though they have written very little (or zero) code. That sort of misplaced disrespect could possibly sometimes make a person feel righteously hostile. Of course, I do realize that UX is its own field with knowledge that isn't automatically absorbed in the process of coding, but that doesn't really change the situation between coders and UX designers.
I think you might be conflating honesty and hostility.
Maybe this is being a tad catty, and standing in the way of innovation in some respects but design led initiatives that don't take a close look at the world from other discipline's perspectives are usually doomed.
I don't think they ever had any intention of it becoming a default wikipedia/mediawiki design - it was simply a way for a design team to show their chops by saying 'this is what it could have been / could be'.
I can totally understand the frustration from the engineers and developers who get that 'the design team always think they know best' feeling - hell, I've been there countless times - but I don't think they meant for that.
But reading some of the comments in that thread, I felt awful for them - nevermind a lack of constructive criticism, some of it was just out and out hate.
I'd like to think if they were ever taken on to design a site they'd be able to sit down with the developers/UX team/marketers/SEOs/whoever and come up with something that works for everyone. That's a lot of what being a good designer is about.
(For the record, there really has been countless times I've been given a design from a designer and almost wept with frustration. Mostly with agencies that employed print designers who've been forced to now design for web.)