Unfortunately this seems to be the way the world is working. People who like what you did do not speak up. People wo do not like it complain as loud as possible. Maybe it's because complaining is more likely to lead to responses. Or because when you have a negative feeling about something you feel more urge to speak up.
I know this should not necessarily result in mean complaints, but often it does. So, what can we do against it? Simply ignore mean comments? Take care to write better comments? Or should we just shut up when we have nothing to say?
I think mean comments, such as you get on Hacker News often have a grain of truth to them. That such emotion is attached to that grain of truth suggests that someone likes your idea or cares enough about your product or the area you're focussing on that it's worth pursuing.
Better then to count the meanness as validation of what you're working on and to extract the grain of truth as constructive criticism suggesting how you can improve.
Ironically this article describes what I started feeling while reading it:
I was wondering myself, why? Why consume time, energy to write something that adds no value whatsoever. Why consuming that little amount of electricity required for you to type and that little amount of storage required to host your (destructive) boring comment. And why are you making the arrogant assumptions that we want to invest our time and energy in reading your comment too?"
Don't be mean, find a more positive and constructive output for your feelings instead - like a passive-aggressive, poorly disguised excuse for bashing another community.
What you have just done is not an actual defense of your community and its behavior. It is an attack on the OP. the OPs conduct has no bearing on the justifications and motivation of your conduct.
We should all endeavor to be more humane to others, and I'm sad to see a comment like this leaning towards a persecution complex more than an understanding of others.
What you have just done is not an actual defense of your community and its behavior.
Was that a requirement for posting to this thread?
I thought TFA was ironic - criticizing others for wasting their electrons typing something non-productive while it was basically criticizing others and wasting electrons typing something non-productive.
Seriously, nobody is curing cancer in TFA or this thread.
Spreading misery and bad feeling does not require a substantive topic to be conveyed or middle school would be considerably more pleasant for everyone involved.
You're right in the following fashion. I assumed that folks who participated in this thread might want to be self-aware enough to check themselves before they wreck themselves in a thread about nastiness.
Some folks (i would probably dub them trolls) might just double down on the nastiness. I'd rather assume some good faith in discussing the topic.
Even if you disagree with the OP, it is possible to point out the substantive facts over which you disagree, or to point out the flaws in the OP's premise without attacking the OP.
If there's no problem, then there's no problem.
But I don't think that's the case. HN's sharp edges occasionally protrude, and maybe it's just my nostalgic memory, but it feels to me like people have been getting nasty just for the sake of being nasty (or edgy, or funny, or whatever).
People can be wrong, mistaken, misguided, misinformed, but unless they're being malicious I wish that people would more often give others the benefit of the doubt.
There is a person on the other end of that keyboard (at least as far as we, or Turing knows).
Regardless of whether there's something to defend or not (as i said earlier), that doesn't excuse attacking others, especially in a conversation about civility.
Aside from arguing over the contours of whether something is or isn't hypocrisy, all being mean does is drag you down too. I'm not telling GP that he is obligated to do anything. All I've said is that his response to OP makes him come off as poorly as OP does and will not further his goals.
You can call that condescending if you want, but that doesn't really pertain to the discussion, if you assume that GP is participating in the conversation in good faith, and is addressing the OP's point.
Nice attempt to deflect their current DMCA clustercuss. Makes good points but this is rather poorly written and not well–considered... and seems kind of unnecessary for a company blog.
Umm... Are you even aware that the submission is a forum post on "Designer News" (a Hacker News for designers) by someone who does not appear at all to be affiliated with Layervault. It's basically the Designer News equivalent of a Tell HN post.
Well, at any rate it is a ripoff of Hacker news :) They do the same as ycombinator..
Which in itself of course is a perfectly valid course of action but it makes their outrage over a supposed clone of their work a tad less convincing :)
Out of curiosity, where's the discussion the OP is talking about?
I do think meanness is worth calling out, FWIW, though in my experience HN discussions are better than most I see online (though far from faultless, of course).
...which in turn gives me faith that when there really are unduly mean discussions, someone calling them out can actually improve things (whereas I imagine an article calling out meanness on /. or similar and can't imagine who would even read it).
...which admittedly doesn't have a great discussion, but it's not worthless.
The one you linked, though, is worth highlighting as a completely useless discussion, due to some meanness (mild as it goes), but mostly just a sad lack of thoughtful commenters, all of whom seemed to think several dozen redundant comments about the OP's headshot on his blog post was valuable feedback.
I didn't see any discussion whatsoever on the actual content of the OP.
However, what I see in that thread are valid criticisms. The article and author were self promoting the author's expertise in UX -- with the promotion rather more prominent than the article content. Meanwhile, aside from the, um, "self aggrandizement", the site violated cardinal UX rules.
Readers called him on it without using faux polite weasel words, and he says he'll fix it.
Pretty sure constructive feedback is what submitting your own material to HN is for.
That discussion lacks basic civility. A good half of comments there is not something that their authors would've been willing (or have guts) to say to guy's face. Hilariously, they are in fact being mean.
There's a lot of things that I truly believe that I wouldn't say to someone's face, depending on the size and belligerence of the someone, and whether I care at all whether they agree with what I believe to be true.
Using that as a metric is silly. Is that too mean?
I think he is talking about the discussion[1] about the new facebook news feed.
This is not an isolated instance, however. For some reason people who reply seem to always look at things from the worst prespective possible. Some are valid concerns, others not so much but you end up with a (very) pessimistic view of things if you consider only opinions expressed on HN. It makes me feel a bit sad and down.
I think this happens because people who like the post, product, etc don't know how to express appreciation in a meaningul way. Maybe it is easier to pinpoint specific things that you don't like than to be specific about a product you like. You get that overall feeling that it is an improvement but cannot easily pinpoint all the reasons why.
I also have faith that things can improve if people, instead of only writing about specific things that they don't like, take some time to also write about the small things that often go unnoticed but make great products great.
English is not my first language so I looked up in a dictionary the word "mean" and one of the meanings was "Extremely unpleasant or disagreeable". It pretty much sums up the top comments on that thread.
"They always try to make it interesting by making it sound like it's about stories and people and stuff. When really it's about cats and food and silly quotes of not so famous people."
I don't think it is Facebook's fault that some friends post this kind of things and I can't see how this comment is constructive in any way.
"Great. It isn't Schadenfreude exactly, but I hope big changes ups (that they have to make because doing nothing is not an option) like this accelerate their decline.
I don't think Facebook will go away any time soon but it will become another Yahoo and that can only be a good thing for the ecosystem in terms of opportunities."
This one is like wishing Michael Phelps dies so you can win some medals.
These are just some examples. If you read the Linode thread you will also find that the top comment is negative, has nothing to do with the content of the blog post, and does not offer any constructive criticism that people from Linode could use to improve their service. In all fairness in both threads there are also a lot of positive comments and constructive criticisms but for some reasons those tend to get burried.
OK I don't see those comments as being in the slightest bit mean - I would be appalled at anyone wishing any kind of harm (or even directing criticism at) an individual rather than their work.
NB
I am British and the apparent ambient meanness level in most banter probably appeals to be quite high - in reality it is just the fact that we probably waste more of our time on attempts at humour than most other nationalities....
If you go and remove someones work for no damn reason and I criticize you, that makes me mean; there is absolutely no logic in your post.
The whole post was idiotic and was trying to deflect the fact that they filed a DMCA takedown when there was no evidence that the work (flatUI) belongs to them.
Ironically, this post perfectly fits the what the submitter is talking about since you don't even have your facts right. The submission appears to be as affiliated with Layervault as any HN submission is affiliated with YC (that is, not at all).
Of course they are associated. Y combinator gets cred for hosting a platform for ‘real hackers’, the hacker news users like the association with a prestigious incubator. The domain name chosen for hacker news reflects this.
Layervault is trying to do the same trick for their brand.
Do other people go around bragging to their friends "Yeah, I comment on HN stuff all the time!"... or is there some other benefit I have from "being associated with a[n incubator]" (I'm quite sure HN wouldn't want me to go around saying I'm "associated" with them.)))
Hacker news reputation means something mainly in the context of the hacker news community, surely. But the Hacker news community manages to centralise a lot of discussion in the tech community, and how does it work that people are attracted to and stay loyal to HN? I do think the Ycombinator / Paul Graham brand has played a part in that.
This is not the Layervault blog, it‘s someone posting on Designer News, a Hacker News inspired discussion community launched by Layervault.
(Of course, the confusion is deliberate, I imagine they hope that the association with a vibrant community will work well for Layervault and vice versa, like in Y combinator <-> Hacker News)
I've never seen much ad hominem or meanness in the comments here. In fact, I think this place is awfully civil. People here have no problem calling one another out on something that is incorrect or dubious, and I like that. I'd rather a spade is called a spade than a bunch of people skirting around the issue in the name of politeness.
Hmmm ... if I offer what I believe as a valid criticism (constructively) but it offends someone, they're going to tend to think of me as mean regardless of my intention.
But I also think you can offer both compliments and criticism respectfully ... and I think that may be what the writer really wants. What value would there be to a "Show HN" if all you got were platitudes?
As an aside, I quit swearing (completely) when I was 18 or so, because I realized that I knew enough language to articulate my feelings. It's led to people assuming I only have nice things to say when the reality is that I can be (I think) more scathing (in other words, the tone of what you say is important too ... especially on the Internet).
* Hmmm ... if I offer what I believe as a valid criticism (constructively) but it offends someone, they're going to tend to think of me as mean regardless of my intention.*
Just because something offends someone else does not force that person to think of you as "mean". I don't buy into that argument at all. I can be offended but think "That guy's just a jerk - that's the way he is" (jerk != mean). Or I can choose to think, "He maybe was a bit harsh in how he said it, but ultimately his point is correct."
You aren't "wrong" in your other ideas, but I just don't agree that offending someone causes them to think you are mean.
Asking somebody not to be mean seems reasonable but he only gets mean after he has already "lost it". He then unfailingly perceives the other guy as the mean one and himself as the victim. If he had the self-awareness necessary to monitor his emotional state then he would not become mean in the first place.
Combine this with the fact that most people come to news sites for validation rather than enlightenment and one can expect mean comments to grow in proportion to the popularity of the site
Mean comments are a waste of space; they take up the space on the page where actually valuable content should be.
I've always hated the "grow a thicker skin" comment, regardless -- it shifts the blame onto the victim, and is simply impossible for some people and some situations -- but the problem here is that one person gets hurt (more or less, depending on thickness of skin), and lots & lots of readers get crap instead of brain food.
That's debatable, to be sure, but do you have a similar example from an HN discussion?
I don't think I've ever seen a mean post in the context of an HN discussion that wouldn't have been improved by removing the meanness, or simply deleting it.
The worst part of HN and the ecosystem isn't being mean, its people reverting to a meta discussion about how useless and silly HN is when they don't have a response to valid criticism or argument.
That's what drove me off Daily Kos five years ago. Meta responses to meta responses to petty bullshit. The endless complaining was invariably far worse than the original issue, and it never resolved anything.
You can't change the behavior of a bunch of strangers with simple argument. If that's your goal, you need to actually do something more substantive.
While I can appreciate the sentiment of being friendly, it's something I strive to do, what this post actually does to accomplish it is nothing. It's a fairly sweeping generalization of a community, and to top it off you try to admonish the naysayers with "don't be stupid," and accusations of arrogance. It comes off as petty with low effort.
If you want people to be more positive, that's admirable. That being said, this post accomplishes nothing to encourage people to be more friendly.
...and this kind of comment is probably what was being called out. Its typical of HN comments - it deconstructs what was going on, and ranks it.
A sensitive person (read: designer) would call it mean. I think its just a different mode of discourse. It is not sweet or kind; it just is. No more mean than a compiler error message.
I don't really think it's fair to say designers are sensitive. I understand your sentiment, but generalizing personalities by profession is stereotyping and fans the flames.
Well done! Another deconstruction, and an analysis. You must be an engineer (Kidding!)
I think personality and profession are mightily correlated. To discriminate on that basis would be wrong, but to use that correlation for analysis can be very helpful.
If the GP was "mean", I hope these sensitive people never see the rest of the Internet. They might die of a heart attack from the shock.
HN is, quite frankly, one of the most civilized forums I've ever had the pleasure of coming across. Of course, we should always strive for the better, regardless of what other sites do. But constructive criticism and pointing out of flaws in logic is not "mean" in and of itself.
Just because people are regularly called on their bald-faced assertions that don't hold up to scrutiny doesn't make this forum mean. What next, are we going to start claiming that cults and superstition deserve respect because otherwise someone's feelings might get hurt?
I suspect designers can have opinions expressed about their work. But there's always the fact that its a matter of opinion or preference, so self-confidence can be protected by thinking "That's just their point of view. I know better"
Programmers can be just plain wrong. Then get dissected on HN, for all the world to see. That's hard to take.
But I still maintain HN is not 'mean'. And its not Alpha-Programmer posturing. Its a conversation about facts, indisputable much of the time.
The point is, if your self-image is threatened, maybe its for good reason and not because somebody is picking on you.
What's worse than people "wasting electricity" making ostensibly mean comments? I know. It's writing an entire blog post about it!
The anti-dote, usually, for a "Don't be mean ..." request is "Don't take it personally".
To defend HN comments ... The comments are the reason why I, and I'm sure many, come here to read. Most times HN comments far out-value the original articles posted.
I don't think people are intentionally trying to be mean, but sometimes it appears that way to others. Generally this site is full of smart people with strong opinions, and for the most part that's a good thing that drives some interesting discussion.
Unfortunately, smart people with an opinion sometimes have a problem seeing the other side of the coin, and tend to see their point of view as the only right one.
A good example is yesterdays 'PHP is the right tool for the job' post.(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5337498) The authors point that PHP is a great tool for getting something up and running quickly without having a lot of knowledge of servers and software was spot on, but he got a lot of hate from the HN community. As a bad programmer (programming is not what I do, I've only learned it to be a better manager, strategist and sparring partner) I can tell you that PHP is by far the easiest thing to get up and running for a fool like me. Yet noone seemed to accept this fact, and came up with a whole lot of 'ruby is just as easy, you just need to install [something I've never heard of, and probably wouldn't understand], or in python you just run [stuff I don't know] on the command line [which I haven't got a clue how works] and you're good to go.
These comments weren't meant to be mean, but from my perspective they were, because I'm at a very different skill level than the peolpe making the comments. They totally missed the point that PHP works for a lot of people because Ithey have no idea how a command line works, don't know how to edit configuration files, and don't care.
The problem isn't that people are intentionally mean, it's that some people are so knowledgeable in their area of expertise that they have problems seeing how it could be hard for others, and thus end up making remarks that seem mean, but really aren't meant to be.
I bet a lot of people on HN still don't see why PHP is so popular, even though the answer is unbelievable obvious. To me.
This is tangential to your very relevant comment, but FYI, a command line is somewhere you type a command (a 'line of code') and it executes as if it was in the middle of a running program.
Very useful when you want to see or confirm how somethig works. Type it and press 'Enter'. It comes with the python installation, and it's commonly called Interactive Interpreter.
Thanks for the comment, I know what a command line is, I just find it incredibly confusing and unintuitive. To exemplify here are a few of the problems I run into when faced with a command line:
- what can I do here? There are no tips, clues, or any other way of knowing what to write. The answer often given is that there are MAN pages, help files, etc. that you can bring up by typing more cryptic commands. I just don't have the motivation to sift through a whole bunch of documents that may or may not have the answer I'm looking for.
- On a windows machine CLI doesn't work out of the box. I need to install cygwin, configure it, and do all sorts of stuff I don't know about and don't care about.
- I get no feedback. When I've typed some cryptic command into the commandline and hit enter I'm presented with a prompt. Maybe everything went well, maybe it didn't. Maybe I now have a virus since I found the cryptic command somewhere on the Internet. i just don't know.
- I can't undo stuff. When I type a command and then find out it was wrong, I have no obvious way of undoing it.
The point isn't that command lines are bad, on the contrary it's quite obvious that it's a really powerful tool. It just has a steep learning curve, and not all people are interested in spending the time it takes to master it just to get a wordpress installation up and running.
The point is more that it's hard for experts to see why it's so hard to just type 'grep -lsm (er /:rt) disc -f' to make the computer magically do something. There are a whole lot of assumptions that take years to master before you can type a command like that and not have your heart skip a beat when you hit enter.
And that's okay, it's why good hackers are worth a lot of money. The majority of people however, just want that wordpress blog to work.
Ignorance of the alternatives. Ignorance of its drawbacks. Ignorance of its outright dangerous flaws. Ignorance of the horrible practices it encourages. Ignorance of the PHP community's ignorance.
Those are among the reasons many of us speak out loudly against PHP, and against similarly flawed languages, like JavaScript.
Civility does not work when ignorance is at play, and when the consequences of inaction can be severe.
Sorry the world does not conform to the way you liked it to be.
The good thing is that since everyone else besides you and a handfull of elite and puritan developers are doing it wrong, you should have no problem taking over the world.
Apparently the choice of language is paramount to your impact on the world.
Arrogance is the best way to ensure your point doesn't get across to those that would benefit from it. The consequences of bad actions are an order of magnitude worse.
I've met several people who tend to shy away from Ruby due to its community. Not the language, not its capabilties, its community. Same for one person I know with Python because her project would have definitely benefited from Django. But after an underserved pigeonholing on a QandA forum (that shall go unnamed) for making a few assumptions due to her PHP background she went with PHP after all.
There's nothing "arrogant" about pointing out that PHP and JavaScript are extremely flawed programming languages. It's just an objective truth. It's no more "arrogant" than saying that 1 + 1 = 2, or that Berlin is a city in Germany.
I'd be interested in seeing the "QandA forum" discussion that you mentioned. Please provide a link to it, so we can judge for ourselves what actually happened in that case.
Civility does not work when ignorance is at play, and when the consequences of inaction can be severe.
Civility is always how people get ideas to stick as belittlement and ridicule just doesn't work.
It's not what you say; it's how you say it. That's the first rule of effective communication since humans were around to communicate and your inability or unwillingness to accept some deocurm in your speech isn't helping the situation.
If civility worked for the Civil Rights Movement, it will work to educate programmers. Empathy carries greater weight than chest-thumping about being right if you're trying to convince someone. The OP was an entry about empathy. Try to have some.
As for the QandA forum, I'm not giving those jerks free traffic. You don't need to accept what I say at face value. Use your objectivity (if it hasn't been ground down to a pulp by your own ego).
My personal preference has absolutely no bearing on the fundamental problems that both PHP and JavaScript exhibit. These flaws will exist, and will continue to cause trouble, regardless of what I think about such languages.
After spending a non-trivial amount of time on HN and various other resources for years, people are definitely intentionally being mean. Not all of them, but a significant amount of people posting harsh comments could do it in a much more constructive way, but that's not what they want. They want to be mean. Sucks for discourse.
I didn't say I was exempt, but I definitely try and avoid "This sucks and you should feel bad. And stupid" and focus on trying to contribute in a more positive manner. Meanness is hard to detect though, so it's all a sliding scale.
What would another framework need to do to truly be able to compete with PHP for people like yourself? As far as I know, you still have to install something to get PHP to run, or are you talking about hosted solutions?
Apache, myqql and PHP comes in a single install package, so you download, click to install and find your home directory where you can start writing code. No configuration necessary. That's important to me, because configuration isn't what I'm interested in. Wordpress, PHPBB and a host of other stuff is the same: Place it in a folder, and run through the HTML based setup. Done. Deploying on a hosted solution is equally easy; copy the PHP files from yuor localhost directory to the host, copy the DB using the webbased mysql manager and you're done.
Also, I like the fact that there's a direct and obvious link between the files you create and the pages you see. Create something.php in your home directory and it will appear as something.php in localhost. I checked out a few other languages, and there appeared to be a non-trivial link between files and HTML.
Also, the PHP community is very helpful for beginners. Asking what an array is, or how to display the time in a snippet of HTML isn't frowned upon, but respectfully answered.
I'm fully aware of the drawbacks of this simplistic approach such as spaghetti code, security concerns, scalability and probably much more. But that isn't really the point, if I'm making a microsite for a friend, or a mockup to see if something will work I don't really care.
Coders attacking designers attacking coders ... this happens too much. I often wonder if the underlying problem is the rift between designers and coders constantly reinforced by pure business people who keeps us at a distance and call us each the most important in private. Can't we all just get along?
"Whenever you are thinking about writing a comment ask yourself, is this helpful, is this funny or is this a question? If you get no positive answer don't post it."
Yes, but take out the "is this funny". I've been funny many times and gotten downvoted. By the way, a penguin, a priest, and a rabbit went into a bar and ordered a drink...
Here is the thing about Hacker News Comment Threads - They are precisely as mean as the subject/object allows.
HN Commentators take pleasure in dissections (and even more pleasure in dissecting those dissections). That can be tough for people, especially if they submitted their content because they wanted feel-good feedback or some kind of community exchange.
It is very easy to burn your fingers around here - one slip of technical details, get one fact of history wrong and you will be told. Ruthlessly and again and again. If anything at all about your content is distracting, that will be what users latch onto.
Of course it's kind of bad, of course people are often dismissive because of trivial bits to the point where they actively obstruct themselves of interesting discoveries.
But I value it's Zen-like quality. I know that if I ever were to submit something to HN, should it find its way to the frontpage, I would, definitely find out every single flaw about it. Quickly.
From a technical perspective, that is kind of neat. From a social perspective, it's about as emphatic as a meat cleaver.
I understand your opinion but I think that this won't change soon. This site is used by a lot of technical people and by definition their behavior tend to be like what you described above.
Asking someone not to be mean is passive-aggressive bullying.
If someone is being mean, you confront the behavior it by:
1. Tell them you don't like their tone and that it isn't constructive. Make sure you criticize the behavior, not the person.
2. Ask them if they want to share their point of view instead of trashing someone else.
3. Empathize with their point of
view (the Internet makes this really hard)
If none of the above works, ignore the person (the Internet makes it very easy to not make other people's feelings your problem). Not the adult thing to do, but silence is a signal to trolls that they aren't going to be fed any time soon.
In terms of mean comments, I think that's just a way of people to express themselves in something they don't agree in order to seek some attention. A person who has high amount of knowledge in different areas it does not matter what newbies use and probably they even encourage them with positive opinion because they don't need an approval from other members of the community.
The main problem is that every community gets biased toward certain trend or way of thinking and they suppress opinions against them. HN is less biased in this sense but still that exist.
What I've always thought set HN above other sites like Reddit is the quality of the arguments. At the end of the day we all learn and grow by putting forward our positions on various topics and issues and seeing what comes out of it. And those positions can and should be aggressively defended as need be. If you take it personally then clearly that is your problem and no one else's.
When we start attacking the person everyone loses.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadI know this should not necessarily result in mean complaints, but often it does. So, what can we do against it? Simply ignore mean comments? Take care to write better comments? Or should we just shut up when we have nothing to say?
Better then to count the meanness as validation of what you're working on and to extract the grain of truth as constructive criticism suggesting how you can improve.
I was wondering myself, why? Why consume time, energy to write something that adds no value whatsoever. Why consuming that little amount of electricity required for you to type and that little amount of storage required to host your (destructive) boring comment. And why are you making the arrogant assumptions that we want to invest our time and energy in reading your comment too?"
We should all endeavor to be more humane to others, and I'm sad to see a comment like this leaning towards a persecution complex more than an understanding of others.
Was that a requirement for posting to this thread?
I thought TFA was ironic - criticizing others for wasting their electrons typing something non-productive while it was basically criticizing others and wasting electrons typing something non-productive.
Seriously, nobody is curing cancer in TFA or this thread.
You're right in the following fashion. I assumed that folks who participated in this thread might want to be self-aware enough to check themselves before they wreck themselves in a thread about nastiness.
Some folks (i would probably dub them trolls) might just double down on the nastiness. I'd rather assume some good faith in discussing the topic.
Even if you disagree with the OP, it is possible to point out the substantive facts over which you disagree, or to point out the flaws in the OP's premise without attacking the OP.
If there's no problem, then there's no problem.
But I don't think that's the case. HN's sharp edges occasionally protrude, and maybe it's just my nostalgic memory, but it feels to me like people have been getting nasty just for the sake of being nasty (or edgy, or funny, or whatever).
People can be wrong, mistaken, misguided, misinformed, but unless they're being malicious I wish that people would more often give others the benefit of the doubt.
There is a person on the other end of that keyboard (at least as far as we, or Turing knows).
It's really hard to be critical of criticism without committing the very act you're claiming to be attacking.
Aside from arguing over the contours of whether something is or isn't hypocrisy, all being mean does is drag you down too. I'm not telling GP that he is obligated to do anything. All I've said is that his response to OP makes him come off as poorly as OP does and will not further his goals.
You can call that condescending if you want, but that doesn't really pertain to the discussion, if you assume that GP is participating in the conversation in good faith, and is addressing the OP's point.
Also, Is this a rip off of the HN visual redeux extension that was posted, or vice-versa, or is it the same person?
edit: Well, I feel sufficiently stupid after thinking this through: I'm posting a comment on "news.ycombinator.com" after all...
Which in itself of course is a perfectly valid course of action but it makes their outrage over a supposed clone of their work a tad less convincing :)
Still think it's not a particularly good or necessary commentary, though.
I do think meanness is worth calling out, FWIW, though in my experience HN discussions are better than most I see online (though far from faultless, of course).
...which in turn gives me faith that when there really are unduly mean discussions, someone calling them out can actually improve things (whereas I imagine an article calling out meanness on /. or similar and can't imagine who would even read it).
...which admittedly doesn't have a great discussion, but it's not worthless.
The one you linked, though, is worth highlighting as a completely useless discussion, due to some meanness (mild as it goes), but mostly just a sad lack of thoughtful commenters, all of whom seemed to think several dozen redundant comments about the OP's headshot on his blog post was valuable feedback.
I didn't see any discussion whatsoever on the actual content of the OP.
However, what I see in that thread are valid criticisms. The article and author were self promoting the author's expertise in UX -- with the promotion rather more prominent than the article content. Meanwhile, aside from the, um, "self aggrandizement", the site violated cardinal UX rules.
Readers called him on it without using faux polite weasel words, and he says he'll fix it.
Pretty sure constructive feedback is what submitting your own material to HN is for.
That discussion lacks basic civility. A good half of comments there is not something that their authors would've been willing (or have guts) to say to guy's face. Hilariously, they are in fact being mean.
Using that as a metric is silly. Is that too mean?
It's more likely it's the other link that's posted - the official FB Feed announcement.
This is not an isolated instance, however. For some reason people who reply seem to always look at things from the worst prespective possible. Some are valid concerns, others not so much but you end up with a (very) pessimistic view of things if you consider only opinions expressed on HN. It makes me feel a bit sad and down.
I think this happens because people who like the post, product, etc don't know how to express appreciation in a meaningul way. Maybe it is easier to pinpoint specific things that you don't like than to be specific about a product you like. You get that overall feeling that it is an improvement but cannot easily pinpoint all the reasons why.
I also have faith that things can improve if people, instead of only writing about specific things that they don't like, take some time to also write about the small things that often go unnoticed but make great products great.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5339287
Negative isn't the same as mean.
I don't think it is Facebook's fault that some friends post this kind of things and I can't see how this comment is constructive in any way.
"Great. It isn't Schadenfreude exactly, but I hope big changes ups (that they have to make because doing nothing is not an option) like this accelerate their decline. I don't think Facebook will go away any time soon but it will become another Yahoo and that can only be a good thing for the ecosystem in terms of opportunities."
This one is like wishing Michael Phelps dies so you can win some medals.
These are just some examples. If you read the Linode thread you will also find that the top comment is negative, has nothing to do with the content of the blog post, and does not offer any constructive criticism that people from Linode could use to improve their service. In all fairness in both threads there are also a lot of positive comments and constructive criticisms but for some reasons those tend to get burried.
NB
I am British and the apparent ambient meanness level in most banter probably appeals to be quite high - in reality it is just the fact that we probably waste more of our time on attempts at humour than most other nationalities....
This was close to the top of the front page on HN, so I'm fairly confident that they're talking about this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5339287
Nothing too suss in there from what I read, and most of the top comments are still the same as when the Design News post was made.
If you can't be bothered reading, topics included:
- Facebook steals from Google+. Google+ steals from Facebook.
- People overuse certain adjectives when describing products.
- The impact that new FB design has on advertising, particularly that ads can now take up ~30% screen space
...I don't see where the meanness is
Layervault is trying to do the same trick for their brand.
(Of course, the confusion is deliberate, I imagine they hope that the association with a vibrant community will work well for Layervault and vice versa, like in Y combinator <-> Hacker News)
But I also think you can offer both compliments and criticism respectfully ... and I think that may be what the writer really wants. What value would there be to a "Show HN" if all you got were platitudes?
As an aside, I quit swearing (completely) when I was 18 or so, because I realized that I knew enough language to articulate my feelings. It's led to people assuming I only have nice things to say when the reality is that I can be (I think) more scathing (in other words, the tone of what you say is important too ... especially on the Internet).
Just because something offends someone else does not force that person to think of you as "mean". I don't buy into that argument at all. I can be offended but think "That guy's just a jerk - that's the way he is" (jerk != mean). Or I can choose to think, "He maybe was a bit harsh in how he said it, but ultimately his point is correct."
You aren't "wrong" in your other ideas, but I just don't agree that offending someone causes them to think you are mean.
Combine this with the fact that most people come to news sites for validation rather than enlightenment and one can expect mean comments to grow in proportion to the popularity of the site
Mean comments are a waste of space; they take up the space on the page where actually valuable content should be.
I've always hated the "grow a thicker skin" comment, regardless -- it shifts the blame onto the victim, and is simply impossible for some people and some situations -- but the problem here is that one person gets hurt (more or less, depending on thickness of skin), and lots & lots of readers get crap instead of brain food.
I reckon this is 'mean and a waste of space' then?
I don't think I've ever seen a mean post in the context of an HN discussion that wouldn't have been improved by removing the meanness, or simply deleting it.
You can't change the behavior of a bunch of strangers with simple argument. If that's your goal, you need to actually do something more substantive.
If you want people to be more positive, that's admirable. That being said, this post accomplishes nothing to encourage people to be more friendly.
A sensitive person (read: designer) would call it mean. I think its just a different mode of discourse. It is not sweet or kind; it just is. No more mean than a compiler error message.
I think personality and profession are mightily correlated. To discriminate on that basis would be wrong, but to use that correlation for analysis can be very helpful.
HN is, quite frankly, one of the most civilized forums I've ever had the pleasure of coming across. Of course, we should always strive for the better, regardless of what other sites do. But constructive criticism and pointing out of flaws in logic is not "mean" in and of itself.
Just because people are regularly called on their bald-faced assertions that don't hold up to scrutiny doesn't make this forum mean. What next, are we going to start claiming that cults and superstition deserve respect because otherwise someone's feelings might get hurt?
Programmers can be just plain wrong. Then get dissected on HN, for all the world to see. That's hard to take.
But I still maintain HN is not 'mean'. And its not Alpha-Programmer posturing. Its a conversation about facts, indisputable much of the time.
The point is, if your self-image is threatened, maybe its for good reason and not because somebody is picking on you.
The anti-dote, usually, for a "Don't be mean ..." request is "Don't take it personally".
To defend HN comments ... The comments are the reason why I, and I'm sure many, come here to read. Most times HN comments far out-value the original articles posted.
Unfortunately, smart people with an opinion sometimes have a problem seeing the other side of the coin, and tend to see their point of view as the only right one.
A good example is yesterdays 'PHP is the right tool for the job' post.(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5337498) The authors point that PHP is a great tool for getting something up and running quickly without having a lot of knowledge of servers and software was spot on, but he got a lot of hate from the HN community. As a bad programmer (programming is not what I do, I've only learned it to be a better manager, strategist and sparring partner) I can tell you that PHP is by far the easiest thing to get up and running for a fool like me. Yet noone seemed to accept this fact, and came up with a whole lot of 'ruby is just as easy, you just need to install [something I've never heard of, and probably wouldn't understand], or in python you just run [stuff I don't know] on the command line [which I haven't got a clue how works] and you're good to go.
These comments weren't meant to be mean, but from my perspective they were, because I'm at a very different skill level than the peolpe making the comments. They totally missed the point that PHP works for a lot of people because Ithey have no idea how a command line works, don't know how to edit configuration files, and don't care.
The problem isn't that people are intentionally mean, it's that some people are so knowledgeable in their area of expertise that they have problems seeing how it could be hard for others, and thus end up making remarks that seem mean, but really aren't meant to be.
I bet a lot of people on HN still don't see why PHP is so popular, even though the answer is unbelievable obvious. To me.
Very useful when you want to see or confirm how somethig works. Type it and press 'Enter'. It comes with the python installation, and it's commonly called Interactive Interpreter.
- what can I do here? There are no tips, clues, or any other way of knowing what to write. The answer often given is that there are MAN pages, help files, etc. that you can bring up by typing more cryptic commands. I just don't have the motivation to sift through a whole bunch of documents that may or may not have the answer I'm looking for.
- On a windows machine CLI doesn't work out of the box. I need to install cygwin, configure it, and do all sorts of stuff I don't know about and don't care about.
- I get no feedback. When I've typed some cryptic command into the commandline and hit enter I'm presented with a prompt. Maybe everything went well, maybe it didn't. Maybe I now have a virus since I found the cryptic command somewhere on the Internet. i just don't know.
- I can't undo stuff. When I type a command and then find out it was wrong, I have no obvious way of undoing it.
The point isn't that command lines are bad, on the contrary it's quite obvious that it's a really powerful tool. It just has a steep learning curve, and not all people are interested in spending the time it takes to master it just to get a wordpress installation up and running.
The point is more that it's hard for experts to see why it's so hard to just type 'grep -lsm (er /:rt) disc -f' to make the computer magically do something. There are a whole lot of assumptions that take years to master before you can type a command like that and not have your heart skip a beat when you hit enter.
And that's okay, it's why good hackers are worth a lot of money. The majority of people however, just want that wordpress blog to work.
Ignorance of the alternatives. Ignorance of its drawbacks. Ignorance of its outright dangerous flaws. Ignorance of the horrible practices it encourages. Ignorance of the PHP community's ignorance.
Those are among the reasons many of us speak out loudly against PHP, and against similarly flawed languages, like JavaScript.
Civility does not work when ignorance is at play, and when the consequences of inaction can be severe.
The good thing is that since everyone else besides you and a handfull of elite and puritan developers are doing it wrong, you should have no problem taking over the world.
Apparently the choice of language is paramount to your impact on the world.
Ohh wait...
I've met several people who tend to shy away from Ruby due to its community. Not the language, not its capabilties, its community. Same for one person I know with Python because her project would have definitely benefited from Django. But after an underserved pigeonholing on a QandA forum (that shall go unnamed) for making a few assumptions due to her PHP background she went with PHP after all.
And that's a damn shame.
(Full disclosure, I work mostly with C#)
I'd be interested in seeing the "QandA forum" discussion that you mentioned. Please provide a link to it, so we can judge for ourselves what actually happened in that case.
It's not what you say; it's how you say it. That's the first rule of effective communication since humans were around to communicate and your inability or unwillingness to accept some deocurm in your speech isn't helping the situation.
If civility worked for the Civil Rights Movement, it will work to educate programmers. Empathy carries greater weight than chest-thumping about being right if you're trying to convince someone. The OP was an entry about empathy. Try to have some.
As for the QandA forum, I'm not giving those jerks free traffic. You don't need to accept what I say at face value. Use your objectivity (if it hasn't been ground down to a pulp by your own ego).
Apache, myqql and PHP comes in a single install package, so you download, click to install and find your home directory where you can start writing code. No configuration necessary. That's important to me, because configuration isn't what I'm interested in. Wordpress, PHPBB and a host of other stuff is the same: Place it in a folder, and run through the HTML based setup. Done. Deploying on a hosted solution is equally easy; copy the PHP files from yuor localhost directory to the host, copy the DB using the webbased mysql manager and you're done.
Also, I like the fact that there's a direct and obvious link between the files you create and the pages you see. Create something.php in your home directory and it will appear as something.php in localhost. I checked out a few other languages, and there appeared to be a non-trivial link between files and HTML.
Also, the PHP community is very helpful for beginners. Asking what an array is, or how to display the time in a snippet of HTML isn't frowned upon, but respectfully answered.
I'm fully aware of the drawbacks of this simplistic approach such as spaghetti code, security concerns, scalability and probably much more. But that isn't really the point, if I'm making a microsite for a friend, or a mockup to see if something will work I don't really care.
For fear of being mean (and stupid) I shan't put words to what I think about this.
Yes, but take out the "is this funny". I've been funny many times and gotten downvoted. By the way, a penguin, a priest, and a rabbit went into a bar and ordered a drink...
HN Commentators take pleasure in dissections (and even more pleasure in dissecting those dissections). That can be tough for people, especially if they submitted their content because they wanted feel-good feedback or some kind of community exchange.
It is very easy to burn your fingers around here - one slip of technical details, get one fact of history wrong and you will be told. Ruthlessly and again and again. If anything at all about your content is distracting, that will be what users latch onto.
Of course it's kind of bad, of course people are often dismissive because of trivial bits to the point where they actively obstruct themselves of interesting discoveries.
But I value it's Zen-like quality. I know that if I ever were to submit something to HN, should it find its way to the frontpage, I would, definitely find out every single flaw about it. Quickly.
From a technical perspective, that is kind of neat. From a social perspective, it's about as emphatic as a meat cleaver.
If someone is being mean, you confront the behavior it by:
1. Tell them you don't like their tone and that it isn't constructive. Make sure you criticize the behavior, not the person.
2. Ask them if they want to share their point of view instead of trashing someone else.
3. Empathize with their point of view (the Internet makes this really hard)
If none of the above works, ignore the person (the Internet makes it very easy to not make other people's feelings your problem). Not the adult thing to do, but silence is a signal to trolls that they aren't going to be fed any time soon.
The main problem is that every community gets biased toward certain trend or way of thinking and they suppress opinions against them. HN is less biased in this sense but still that exist.
What I've always thought set HN above other sites like Reddit is the quality of the arguments. At the end of the day we all learn and grow by putting forward our positions on various topics and issues and seeing what comes out of it. And those positions can and should be aggressively defended as need be. If you take it personally then clearly that is your problem and no one else's.
When we start attacking the person everyone loses.