I agree with the poster 100%. Originally I was very enthusiastic about the site, and happy I had found it, but ultimately I realized that every time I visited or attempted to add my input to a thread, I came away feeling depressed and/or angry.<p>It's too clubby, it's taken the general disgust that people feel toward the banality of messageboards that deteriorate into meme-ification or juvenile flamewars... and turned that into a kind of snobby elitism that is just as off-putting.<p>Don't say "thank you" for a useful post because it takes up too much time and space? How utterly ridiculous. Only an antisocial or asocial nerd would come up with such a rule and think it was a great idea, and I say that as an antisocial nerd myself.<p>The system of ranking people by points, insisting that every single post be some giant revelation of wisdom that advances the fortunes of the tech industry and mankind immeasurably, etc. has only exacerbated people's tendency to self-aggrandize, kiss ass, over-analyze minutiae, and constantly try to one-up each other... all cloaked in a brightly colored cheerful passive-aggressive candy coating, of course.<p>I still cruise the site from time to time because it does have great links (one of the few things left going for it) but there is no way in hell I would consider myself part of the community or welcome. I certainly wouldn't and don't come here any more to ask questions or try to learn anything by exposing any gaps in my knowledge to general ridicule and sneering.<p>My two cents.
HN can be a very pessimistic and sad place and I honestly believe it's largely because of the constant downvotes of jokes and other activities that build camaraderie and understanding. I see this happen every single day and do my best to upvote the comments but to no avail. It's the No Me Too Posts Policy taken to the extreme and it alienates people from one another.
I think Hacker News strikes people as negative because a wide diversity of opinions occur here. Like all online communities it is self-selected, but in this case only really along one criteria--coding. All the other bases for affiliating with other people (politics, ideology, opinion, location) can vary widely.<p>Whereas, social network communities like Twitter and Facebook are self-selecting along any number of criteria--political, personal, ideological, local, employer, etc. As a result, I bet most people don't see as much diversity of opinion through their personal social networks as they do in single-issue dedicated online communities like HN.<p>So, I'm not surprised that this author found a more positive response from Twitter, than he did from Hacker News. The people following him on Twitter are already people who have affirmatively chosen to hear what he has to say. The people here have not, so they are more likely to argue, point out flaws, etc.<p>That can come across as negativity, sure--but is it? Is disagreement or challenge such a bad thing?<p>Personally speaking, I think that one result of highly personalized social media networks is that it leads to segregation from opposing opinions or very different points of view. The result is, seemingly, less tolerance for those opinions or points of view.
>When open source communities figured out blogging they started to setup planets<p>Although my interest in open source was very high when one of the early planets, Debian Planet, started, I never found Debian Planet or any other open-source planet worthwhile.<p>>Apache's policy to this day is that any member of the community can syndicate the entire contents of their blog or a specific tagged feed of their blog to the planet. It's the individuals decision how much of themselves they want to share. Mozilla had a nearly identical debate and came to the exact same conclusion<p>This policy has been tried many times, but has never resulted in a blog, feed or form of public online discourse I want to follow.