65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they outperform

Negativity, Attention, and Human Nature

• Many commenters say the finding is unsurprising: all media over-index on negative content; “if it bleeds, it leads” and negativity bias are well‑studied.
• Evolutionary explanations are invoked: focusing on threats and failures aids survival more than celebrating routine successes.
• Several people note that news, politics, and tech outages naturally invite more discussion than “everything is fine” updates.

Constructive Critique vs. Toxic Negativity

• A recurring theme: what the paper labels “negative” often corresponds to skepticism, technical critique, or disagreement—not abuse.
• Users strongly distinguish:
  • “React sux”–style hostility vs.
  • “I don’t like React because X”–style analytic criticism.
• Many say they come to HN specifically for this kind of critical examination, which is often more informative than praise.
• There’s also frustration with pedantic or performatively contrarian replies that nitpick for status rather than insight.

Methodology and Model Limitations

• Multiple commenters challenge the reported average score of 35 points as incompatible with the fact that most HN posts get few or zero votes, implying a sampling bias toward popular items.
• The author acknowledges likely survivorship bias due to API rate limits and promises to clarify and correct the dataset and methodology, and to open‑source the code and data.
• Others scrutinize the sentiment models:
  • DistilBERT is trained on movie reviews, so it treats “evaluative/critical” as negative.
  • Different models disagree sharply; “neutral” isn’t explicitly modeled.
  • Classifiers conflate technical criticism with hostility, which several people see as the central flaw.

Incentives, Engagement, and Platform Comparisons

• Many report that short, snarky, or negative comments get disproportionately more replies and karma than careful, nuanced ones.
• This is tied to broader social-media dynamics: outrage and “ragebait” maximize engagement; controversial content drives comment counts.
• Comparisons with Reddit, Twitter/X, and others: HN is seen as less toxic but more cynical and pedantic, and some feel it’s drifting toward Reddit‑style culture.
• Moderation and design choices (discouraging “thanks” comments, upvote/downvote opacity, lack of subforums) are seen as shaping what kind of “negativity” surfaces.

Norms and Possible Improvements

• Some want more emphasis on framing: from “why this won’t work” to “how could this be made to work.”
• Others argue negativity is necessary to filter bad ideas and expose flaws, but worry about jadedness and doomerism crowding out constructive discussion.
• Several call for richer sentiment analysis (neutral, inquisitive, energetic, technical vs personal) and longitudinal or topic‑specific breakdowns rather than a single positive/negative split.