FRESH
Hacker News
Hacker News Hacker News1. Binning skepticism with negativity.
2. Not allowing for a "neutral" category.
The comment I'm writing right now is critical, but is it "negative?" I certainly don't mean it that way.
It's cool that OP made this thing. The data is nicely presented, and the conclusion is articulated cleanly, and that's precisely why I'm able to build a criticism of it!
And I'm now realizing that I don't normally feel the need to disclaim my criticism by complimenting the OP's quality work. Maybe I should do that more. Or, maybe my engagement with the material implies that I found it engaging. Hmm.
But that 35 as an average score is hard for me to believe at first, I mean, the median HN post gets no votes, last time I looked the mean was around 8 or so. What is he sampling from?
[1] comments/votes = 0.5 is close to the mean
Not that karam matters on HN but I have been disappointed to see longer comments that I put a lot of effort into get ignored while short, pithy comments get way more upvotes/replies. I've spent literally over an hour on some detailed comments that didn't even get a reply from the original person asking a question and likewise had comments I fired off with near-0 thought that "blow up". It's frustrating that better content is not always rewarded.
[0] Something I'm guilty of
If skepticism towards business announcements counts as negativity, I wonder what else we'd be discussing regarding any of those announcements.
An OpenAI marketing piece for instance will already go overboard on the positive side, I don't see relevant commentary being about how it's even better than the piece touts it. Commenting just to say "wow, that's great" or paraphrasing the piece is also useless and thrown upon. At best it would be a factual explanation or expansion of some harder to parse or specialized bits ?
I read the pre published PDF but don't really see stand what we were supposed to take from this blog post in particular.
Aldo am I basically fullfiling the blog post prophecy ?
PS: I think articles that raise to the top page with absolutely no comments would be an example of people straight enjoying the content, and the site actually working great IMHO
In other words, if 35% of hn content is positive (or neutral?), compared to reddit and most mainstream social media, it's actually very positive!
Edit: I found the list of blocked subreddits if anyone is curious to see:
https://hlnet.neocities.org/RIF_filters_categorized.txt
Note that it also includes stuff I wasn't interested in at the time, like anime, and only has subreddits up until I quit, around the API ban.
As with most things, the devil’s in the details. There are plenty of ways to express criticism without descending to personal attacks. I’ve also noticed that when the cynicism/criticism-o-meter runs too high, there’s almost always a top-level meta comment complaining about the complaining.
Personally I’d rather someone tell me I have a piece of food stuck in my teeth than shower me with praise.
As an ESL person one of the first internet-related terms I learned was "flamewar".
EDIT: ESL -> English as a Second Language
> ... we observe extreme inequality in attention distribution. The Gini coefficient of 0.89 places HN among the most unequal attention economies documented in the literature. For comparison, Zhu & Lerman (2016) reported Gini co-efficients of 0.68–0.86 across Twitter metrics. ... The bottom 80% of posts [on HN] receive less than 10% of total upvotes. (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5910263)
This could probably be explained by HN's unique exposure mechanism. Every post starts on /newest and unless it gets picked up by the smaller group of users who browse /newest, it never reaches the front page where the main audience is. In most forums/subreddits by contrast a new post (unless it gets flagged as spam) usually gets some baseline exposure with the main audience before it sinks. On HN the main audience is downstream of an early gate and missing that gate is close to being effectively invisible. IMO this fact alone could probably explain why "attention inequality" seems more extreme on HN.
My usual journey: I visit the comment section and then look for the first top comment that criticizes the core thesis of the article.
In my neighborhood an electrical power outage is news; but yet another day of consistent electrical power supply is not news. But taking a step back, I think it is noteworthy! It makes my life better every day, and compared to the vast sweep of human history, it’s a huge positive anomaly. My life is full of stuff like this, as I suspect the lives are of many HNers.
I say this because while I do value news reporting and knowing what’s wrong or could be better, I also try hard to maintain this broader awareness of what’s (still) positive and going well. Even if its consistency makes it seem unremarkable on short time scales like the daily news cycle.
We need to do something and are working on it. The challenge is to distinguish thoughtful critique from negativity-venting. The former is fine, the latter is lame. HN has a lot of the latter.
I believe it has to do with macro trends (in society at large and on the internet), which we can't expect to be immune from—but also with the community here getting insular. That scares and worries me, because HN won't survive over the long haul if new cohorts of users don't keep showing up. Along with that, there seem to be increased waves of jadedness, bitterness, and cynicism that use this place as a dumping ground for bad feelings.
That's a bad dynamic. The more it happens, the more it encourages more of it. Meanwhile, people who don't enjoy jaded, bitter, or denunciatory rhetoric are incentivized to leave: a classic vicious circle.
This is why we added the following to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html last year: Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.
You'll probably see more statements from us about this in 2026, and hopefully some changes to HN, as we try to do something about it.
If I respond to an article about open-source with “open-source is good”, article about privacy with “privacy is good” etc. with a basic justification and slightly fancier words, I’ll almost surely get upvotes. But I see those opinions on this site practically every day.
I wish people would instead upvote posts and comments with uncommon knowledge and opinions. I do see the former: cool projects and “fun facts” (e.g. an article about the cultural history of an isolated small region) are constantly on the front page and in top comments. But the latter are only in /new and further down comments.
Not a panacea, and I'd be interested to hear others ideas on how to better comment and give feedback.
Rather a lot of what is said in any given social circle has to do with complaining. It's very common for people to point out something that is viewed as bad by everyone. Then the group commiserates and bonds over that. Even though an AI might consider such complaints negative, there might be a positive effect on people feeling heard and supported by a like-minded group.
For this reason, I'd take OP's results with a modicum of salt. Human interaction doesn't have to be all rainbows and unicorns to have a positive psychological impact. As with in-person interactions, I suspect a significant portion of what OP's LLM's described as negative might just be humans bonding through complaint among peers.
That is the key takeaway. If critique is scored as negative, then there is nothing wrong with HN being "negative". Analysis and critical response to new ideas, tech, and products is a good thing, so I believe we should be responding positively to a report that says we apply negativity in productive ways.
Given that, it seems that there is basically zero agreement between DistilBERT and the other models..... In fact even worse they disagree to the extreme with some saying the most positive score is the most negative score.... (even acounting for the inverted scale in results 2-6).
This.. doesn't sound negative to me, at least in how I'd use the word. Substantive critiques and skepticism?
Geez I guess even this very comment would be considered negative because I'm critiquing what they wrote. Amazing post! I absolutely agree! Well done!
But afterwards I'm glad I did, after a month comments can't really haunt you anymore, because they exist in the past.
I'd much rather live in a critical world than a "wholesome" world that ends up being an echochamber
> It's human nature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias. Everyone does it, but we perceive other people as doing it more than we do, which is itself a variation of the bias. You can even see it in the title of the OP, in the word "overwhelmingly". That's excessive: the negative bias is noticeable, but if you look closely, it's not overwhelming. (To make up some numbers, it's more like 60-40, not 90-10.)
However, it often feels as if it is overwhelming; in fact, one or two datapoints, plus negativity bias, are enough to create just such a feeling. The feeling gets expressed in ways that trigger similar feelings in other people, so we end up with a positive* feedback loop.
The interesting question is, what factors mitigate this? how do we dampen negativity bias? or, how do we get negative feedback into our positive feedback loop of negative affect? That must also be happening all the time, or we'd be in a "war of all against all", which isn't the case, though (again) it may feel like it.
* ['positive' in the sense of increasing; a positive loop of negative affect!]
See also:
Ironically, I suspect this article’s title would rightly be evaluated as negative in sentiment analysis.
I recall there being studies on financial loss vs gain, and that financial losses seem to effect emotions about 4x more than wins, so for an actual balanced algorithm, it would seem that positive posts should be boosted about 4-5x to have any chance of being surfaced on a modern social network. Given what we know about human psychology, sentiment boosts really should be a thing. Is anyone working on that?
https://corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-i...
Hmm... Technical critiques are very different from truly negative comments. I'm not sure they should be lumped together. Technical critiques are often interesting and useful.
In my experience, truly negative comments which don't meet the guidelines rarely appear on HN, and when they do appear, they tend to disappear very, very quickly, thanks to the moderators.
Similarly, how does inquisitive perform?
The definition above indicates "negative" may be a bit harsh as a term, it might be useful to see a split of that percentage between "unnecessary pushback" and "scrutiny".
This comment will of course count as negative - it could no doubt be more substantive and better written but hopefully it is understood in the latter sense.
They are either easily to classify as useless when they don’t provide reasoning or they provide useful insight to think about.
If often submit links to HN for that kind of feedback
But posting something positive and getting slammed in the comments? That's depressing. So the barrier to posting something positive seems higher.
There’s just a world of difference between “I don’t like React because I don’t want to write HTML in my JavaScript” and “React sux a$$”
Both are negative statements, but it doesn’t make sense to group them together.
Like…is this comment itself a “negative” comment? Maybe. But I want the author to improve and I think most people here do too…and that’s where HN really shines.
HN post about sentiment analysis on the site and the top comment and thread is just “reddit bad xd”. So glad these sort of novel, riveting conversations are being had here.
"There is a bush with berries over there" is news.
"There is a tiger in that bush over there" is adrenaline inducing huge news.
And that negativity breeds engagement, well we already knew that. Entire industries have cropped up around engagement with negative sentiment and made some people exceedingly wealthy.
I also strongly feel the tech industry has in general gotten a lot gloomier since its hayday before souless MBA's and pervasive user-hostile practices started ruining everything.
Mostly people only comment when there's something wrong
Furthermore, there should be a difference between a contradictory viewpoint and something that is truly negative.
Negative posts outperform because they create unfinished cognitive work. A clean, agreeable story closes the loop, a contested claim or engagement opens and follows the open loop.
Americans are increasingly unhappy, and they're not willing to do what it takes to be happy. Quite the opposite really.
It's not just the internet.
It seems to me they made an algorithmic change a few years back where positive comment are greatly boosted. Since then then the "top" comments are always over-the-top exuberant.
interesting - why use cloudflare vs say hf inference or modal? and is this replicate-cloudflare or normal cloudflare?
Analysing perfection yields not much compared to analysing crap.
Headline: “I went to the doctor and everything was normal.”
Discussion: “That’s nice.”
Headline: “I went to the doctor and I have been diagnosed with X”
Discussion: “X means Y or Z. If Y, A,B,C. If Z, P,Q,R”
Say, this is not a negative comment but may be interpreted to have a negative sentiment due to disagreement with their core thesis.
What if 65% of what's being discussed is stupid or evil? Then 65% negativity would seem to be proportionate. What if 80% of what's posted is stupid? Or 20%?
That's the only way you can really make this number meaningful. You can't just look at the number and read in some undisciplined interpretation.
(And frankly, consider this. Suppose person A makes a claim. Now suppose person B agrees with that claim and person C disagrees with that claim. Who is more likely to respond? If B agrees and has nothing to add, no additional depth or insight to provide, then there is no reason for a followup comment. An upvote suffices. But if C disagrees, then there's something to contradict and a reason to followup with an explanation of why there is disagreement.)
But often these negative/contrary to stablished opinion, or opinions done with passion (but still nore are less respectful), are the most valuable to me, as they give me the oppressed to think outside the box, to ask me questions I would not ask myself if not…
So...
If you say something is going to suck, and it actually sucks, you look like a genius. If you say something is going to suck, and it actually is ok, nobody cares because things turned out fine. If you say something is going to be good, and it turns out good, people say you're smart. If you say something is going to be good, and it turns out to suck, people say you're a moron.
Because of negative bias and game theory, the most logical take to get "social rewards" is be consistently pessimistic. You'll look "smart" online and the times you miss it will be largely ignored. If the reward you get from interacting online is some sort of social capital, being a pessimist will do better than being an optimist unless you're certain things will turn out good. So people tend to be negative.
Or, as I've heard it stated before, "pessimists get to be right, optimists get to be rich."
Good job.
I would expect most comments on HN to be critical and argumentative, but that isn't negativity. Being dismissive without good reason, or actually saying mean things (violates rules) would be clear negativity. But disagreement and questioning things, is part of how we all learn and share information. Matter of fact, the fastest way to learn things (as the meme goes) is to state something obviously incorrect and let people disagree with you, and show you a better way.
In the few years I've been on HN, it's been very rare to see an actual negative comment that isn't simply someone having a sincere opinion different from someone else, and not getting flagged or downvoted-heavily.
Would the author view this comment as negative, or would they see it as inquisitive? Because I'm not even criticizing anything the OP said or did, I'm genuinely wondering.
Did HN get overrun by trolls, shills, and bots? Or did I just get more cranky?
That's fairly basic human nature, unfortunately; especially in today's climate.
For myself, I try to keep it positive. I am quite capable of going really dark (have done so, in the past), but I don't like to shit where I eat. I also feel that I need to recompense for some of the nastiness I used to spew, last century.
That said, my sunshine approach gets some pretty nasty responses. I have to bite my keyboard, and not respond as I'd like.
I just say "Have a great day!", which means I'm done engaging. I have found letting the other party have the last word, ties off the fight.
Real discourse tends to be critical. If you want sloppy trade press, read Apple Insider or Business Insider, or maybe watch a slop tech creator like Linus Tech Tips.
Consider that purely positive but otherwise unconstructive comments like "wow great project! clap" are – for good reason – not what the HN comment feature is intended for and are reliably downvoted to oblivion.
Contentious, challenging, or even slightly provocative reactions however – which are inherently somewhat negative in a wider sense – usually kick off fruitful debates and knowledge-proliferation.
And I probably speak for at least about ~65% of fellow HN's when I say that the latter is what I come here for.
The central knowledge shared is that knowledge behaves like germs and can spread. Those that play on emotions spread better, and among the thought germs that spread based on emotions, the ones that play on anger spread the best.
Worst yet: There are anger based thought germs which live in symbiosis and harmony even if they cause conflict among the humans who hold that germs. You can see this take hold when communities exist entirely of folks who hold a singular belief and they spend all day constructing and destroying uncharitable straw men of opposing ideas.
I've noticed that Reddit _really_ likes this sort of content and fosters these sorts of communities. Communities at scale on reddit quickly become about fostering negatives: hatred of others, blame on the system, self-pity, snarky responses. Instead of the better and more effective: tactical empathy, acceptance and understanding what is within your personal sphere of influence, concrete actions, personal improvements, and forgiveness.
I'm definitely not saying one has to accept the world for how it is, or that it's fair, or anything like that. Humans should change this world! You should vote, you should volunteer, you should help your neighbor, you should understand and be kind to others with different beliefs, and perhaps under the extreme you should die for your beliefs to help enact them.
What you shouldn't do though is spend all day reading and posting memes about subjects you are already familiar with. If you've already made up your mind and are informed on a subject you don't need another meme to help radicalize yourself.
See the difference between mass shooters and hero's like Daryl Davis [2].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc [2] https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...
Could you clarify what do you mean by "points" ("score" in your pre-print)?
Also, what's your data source?
"This study uses publicly available data from Hacker News." is not really a data source.
Also also, you missed the largest, most important effect that skews the votes on this site. But you can definitely find it on the dataset you got, that'd be a very interesting disclosure!
Hint: Immediately after posting this comment, it went to the bottom and "downvotes" magically started to come in ;).
HN:
Vietnam banning ads, AI for drug discovery, geolocating vehicle pic - I'd say two positive one neutral
Google News (UK):
Trump wanting Greenland, Storm Goretti snow, hero could get posthumous award - I'd say two negative one neutral
So maybe HNers have a positive bias after all?
This makes me recall a conversation from a podcast with Sam Harris where he discusses the “pornography of doubt”
Here is the YouTube clip, less than a minute long
Just need to find the right scissor statement to really get the debate going.
I mean, this is pretty much what you'd expect, right? A social network where the focus was on saying how wonderful announcements and industry practices were would be rather boring/pointless.
The most controversial submissions always have a tighter comment to upvote ratio.
The most controversial comments tend to be the most replied to.
- SST-2 (stanford sentiment test) example dataset from IMDB reviews https://huggingface.co/datasets/stanfordnlp/sst2/viewer
- BERT https://aclanthology.org/N19-1423/
- DistilBert -- the optimized model OP was using https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.01108
SST-2 may have been used to train or qualify BERT -- read the papers to get the full story. I did a quick perusal.
It would be nice to have a nutritional label shared with Abstracts, showing the training data, with examples, and the base models.
Even in terms of language, if a USian says "great!", they mean passable, and "ok" means bad.
Imo this is the result of corporate culture being so prevalent it has leaked out into general culture.. The corporate world of bullshit, just be really positive towards your boss and pretend everything is great, all that matters is the hype and getting more investment this quarter.
Also, engineering types tend to be a lot more "negative" relative to those corporate business guys.. If you want to engineer something, and make it work, and actually do a good job, then you need to appraise things realistically and objectively, and you certainly need to point out stupid decisions and bad design.
Having a healthy personal mindset is a different matter. Which is not some public discussion boards business.
Humans have a powerful negativity and bad-news bias. It's probably a left over adaptation. "If you mistake a bush for a lion, you're fine. If you mistake a lion for a bush, you're dead." Your paranoid negativity-biased ancestors survived.
- People with expertise / exceptional qualities are by definition out-numbered by the rest, so there must be privileged seats if you want quality to become represented.
- Social coherence requires turning lots of conversations into a few, again requiring fewer privileged seats to represent views efficiently and have conversations between well-informed people trusted by those they represent.
- Preventing runaway power feedback loops from reinforcing one single set of views requires that independent hierarchies can exist, which is pluralism.
https://positron.solutions/articles/hierarchy-elevates-socia...
And at least the negativity allows us to fix the problems. I’m actually sick of modern toxic positivity, problems that could be fixed early are deliberately ignored until they couldn’t be ignored anymore.
The cooorrrrrporatioooons! OooOOooOoOOoo!
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1) I do not understand in any way the sentiment that discussion should ideally consist of people agreeing with and encouraging each other.
The reason I speak with people is either to inform or learn. If I'm informing, this is not really a discussion. I'm just telling people something that they may not know. There are two ways to learn: one is to listen and not speak, which is the mirror of the above. The way to learn through speaking is that somebody says something, I dispute or question that thing, and that person shows me why I'm wrong.
So the way to learn while speaking is that someone says something, I say something negative about that thing, and then that person says something negative about the negative thing I've just said.
Friends and family are what you need, not the empty, uninformed, ritualistic, and above all socially-pressured positive comment of strangers.
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2) Following up on the first point (which is mainly a personal observation), it's important to say (although completely unsurprising and obvious) that negativity is relative. On HN (or reddit, or any comment site), the first post or OP is assigned positivity.
A great example is this very OP, which is an accusation of negativity on Hacker News, which with no context is quite obviously a post with negative sentiment. The way you would grade reactions to it in a vacuum would say that other posts disputing its conclusions are positive.
Its methodology, however, requires that the posts disputing it be graded as negative: "Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs." What are the OPs that contain these posts? Links to technologies and technology advocates, announcements, recommendations of particular practices, descriptions of APIs.
Accusations of negativity and tone policing are always content-free social control. If I set my point of view as positive and uplifting (while posting about how HN and reddit and social media are evil poison promulgated by evil people who should be physically stopped to save civilization), I can silence dispute through calling the mods rather than through discussion.
The more indefensible my position is, the more I will prefer the sort of "discussion" where I say something, other people dispute it, and I accuse them of being negative people with implications of bad faith and possibly psychological unsoundness.
Flame away ;)
This is the third link off the HN Front Page that yields the following error in Firefox:
Websites prove their identity via certificates. Firefox does not trust this site because it uses a certificate that is not valid for philippdubach.com. The certificate is only valid for the following names: cloudflare-ech.com, *.cloudflare-ech.com
Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN