More seriously, I think the tone of the comments on HN is not supposed to be binary: we don't aim for solely critical or supportive feedback. We try to improve things by offering suggestions. That my comment made it to the top means my suggestions were widely viewed as useful, or at least my criticism was accurate.

The magnitude of the negative sentiment isn't really important. It's the fact that, if the creator values HN's input, he should accept suggestions more-or-less from the top down, and weight them appropriately. If he scrolls to the bottom to see some generic 'Good work man, way to hustle', he doesn't really get it, does he?

> Such a specialized community is a great place to get feedback on the technical details of your product, but not to validate your ideas. The responses from people in these communities tend towards scepticism to negativity, even for products they use.

Or with the methodology. Take for example the Dropbox thread [1] which the OP's sentiment algorithm classifies as having a "negative top comment".

This is what the purportedly negative comment says:

> The only problem is that you have to install something. See, it's not the same as USB drive. Most corporate laptops are locked and you can't install anything on them. That's gonna be the problem. Also, another point where your USB comparison fails is that USB works in places where you don't have internet access.

> My suggestion is to drop the "Throw away your USB drive" tag line and use something else... it will just muddy your vision.

> Kudos for launching it!!! Launching/shipping is extremely hard and you pulled it off! Super!

In what universe, besides the one of a sentiment-analysis-algorithm, would that be considered a "negative" comment? Moreover, even if that last, congratulatory line didn't exist, the rest of that comment is very well-worth listening to. It might have been wrong (has Dropbox penetrated corporate IT as well as USB keys? USB keys have definitely taken a beating in reputation and in convenience...but has Dropbox been an easy transition in corporate IT? At Stanford, we have Box)...but it definitely wasn't non-constructive criticism.

If a submission gets a lot of upvotes, to me that's a positive-enough sign of validation. Is it really helpful to the submitter to see a dozen/hundred comments that are merely, "Awesome! I like it!"? I often like reading the comments before I check out the submission, because I don't want to have to parse Press-Releasese to understand what the product does, or who it may compete against, or what its flaws might be...Even if the comments were completely devoid of constructive and insightful criticism -- I'm sure after a big launch, it's helpful, yet annoying when people immediately nitpick grammar and typos -- if you're a founder of a great product, the hemming and hawing of HN is probably the least of your obstacles on the way to success.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

If you look at my account age and number of comment upvotes you'll see that I don't care about comment upvotes at all and have never made any effort to increase them.

My original comment was to highlight that I think the ratio of positive to negative feedback for what is an impressive effort by an individual seems unbalanced. There's lots of negative feedback and very little positive feedback.

I think positive feedback is important - it's good to know what you're doing well in addition to what you're not doing well.

As someone who has designed a product from scratch before I also think it's incredibly easy for people who haven't gone through that process to underestimate the time and effort involved.

There is always room for feedback, but please make it constructive.

When people post negative criticism, it's because they find the topic important. They find it important enough to evaluate your product. You have to ask yourself whether or not their criticism has any grain of truth to it. And regardless of the answer, it's very important information.

If the answer is, "they don't understand what I'm trying to do," then you've failed at marketing. Your message is garbled and it needs work. There's no such thing as "if you build it, they will come." That movie was about a literal miracle. You need marketing and you need to get good at it.

If the answer is, "they don't understand how early the product is", then their criticism is probably based on a valid reason (expressed poorly) and you probably released too early or with too many features. Minimum Viable Product is about what is viable, not what meets your vision. Either your broken features are necessary and you released too early, or they are not and you need to cut them completely. Better to have no feature than a broken one that makes people bitch at you.

That only leaves, "yes, I recognize that their criticism is based on a valid reason (expressed poorly)". You can pretty much count on people being poor communicators 90% of the time. So your choice becomes to let their failings as a communicator push you into discounting what they have to say--and thereby harming your product--or ignore the packaging and focus on the message--and make a better product for it.

Constructive criticism is fair but most of the comments are straight on aggressive and in most cases not greatly useful or constructive. Many of them are pedantic. In fact, in my opinion most insightful comments are almost always the comments that don't paint the picture in black and white and take everything into consideration. It's almost obvious if you think of it. The smartest people understand and deal with nuances.

> Just man up. While this is true and most people should not take the a stranger on the internet too seriously. However, what most entrepreneurs do is hard. Trying to change the way things work. Most people give it all they have and still fail. What is wrong with being a little supportive? Why not help out a fellow hacker/entrepreneur/community member?

Criticism and friendliness are not mutually exclusive.

2. I am certainly not advocating diffuse positivity. If you knew me, you would know positivity is not my strong suit. :)

There's nothing wrong with saying that the product seems unfocused or overly complex, or suggesting that the creator focuses either the execution or its messaging. That's useful, constructive feedback that the creator can do something with.

There's not really even anything wrong with saying "I don't understand why anyone would use this" -- although that's not particularly useful feedback.

Jumping from these reasonable positions to "you're wasting your time" is where I take issue. It's a dangerous leap of judgement that none of us can or should make for someone else -- certainly with the limited understanding that we can gain after a few minutes.

The creator seems to have come here to get feedback on the product, not for an intervention.

> If the only way some one can give usable problem analysis and criticism is by including suggested fixes,

I think we can all agree that the inclusion of suggested fixes does make feedback more helpful in general.

> and delicately toning down the criticism, then far fewer people are going to be willing to expend enough effort to interact

It does require a little additional effort to write kinder feedback, to take the moment to address the human being behind an Internet comment in a similar way to how we might address a person face to face. I'm as guilty as any of failing in that way.

But if criticism's aim is to improve, it will be more successful if it's more easily digested by its audience. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar and all that.

And really the reply above isn't that big a difference. In my view, it's a sign of intelligence, learning how to communicate effectively. If raising the bar only this high results in "far fewer people" interacting, maybe that's a good thing. I don't really need to hear from people unable to tame their own words when they have no time limit on typing them, and I'd rather belong to a community with fewer responses but a higher proportion of politeness and shared humanity than an array of comments expressing the kind of gruff emphasis on failure that bookends the original comment, "Your gif doesn't convey your idea __at all__," and "i'm confused as to why this project even exists."

Edit: BTW today I learned "stet" thanks to you.

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.

I think many people here will act upon "if you don't have anything nice to say, say nothing."

...which is a pity. Sometimes somebody posts a webapp with very crappy design or the 100th clone of a mediocre idea. Yet most people will tell him how great it is. This is not helpful. Sometimes I wish people were a little bit more critical. Are they afraid about getting voted down? They shouldn't.

I said this a while ago as well[1], but there's a strong bias towards people who are unhappy with $something (for any value of $something). If you think everything is just great then you don't actually all that much to say beyond "hey, looks great!" Sometimes you can expand that to a paragraph of two about what you like, but overall it's hard to write a substantive comment. But if you're not happy with something then it's much easier to write a paragraph or two about what you're unhappy with.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31454200

Was it, really? I think the parent comments did a good job at pointing out a potential, actionable, flaw in this project. That doesn't mean that they should be "scolded" for pointing it out or that they themselves need to fix it.

This is a sub-thread to the original complaint (which was quite reasonable), where OP is taking on an oddly hostile and aggressive tone, and powerfully punching at various strawmen. I'm not sure what you think an adequate reaction would be.

I think some healthy skepticism is fine but the mockery and out of hand dismissals seem like they should be beneath this crowd.

And I guess the word 'critique' connotes a somewhat more detailed, analytical assessment - at least to me.