A Love Letter to People Who Believe in People

The absolute irony of this comment :)

Irony is often the language of truth.

The medium is hard to separate from the message; it is built in to threaded commenting by the voting system. People upvote the comments that best express ideas that they support and as a consequence it is usually hard to add to the most highly upvoted comment. But that is the most obvious comment to attach opposing views to. That leads to a predictable tick/tock thread structure where every 2nd post is thematically similar but every other post is contrary.

The irony here is present but better interpreted as the forum structure being biased towards criticism.

Often is the sometimes of never.

You have a very insightful comment here — one small caveat however: it’s the crowd that is biased towards criticism, not the forum structure.

And this just made me realize why I don’t like HN very much. We live in a bizarre state of mind here with a common interest of creation and furtherance, but simultaneously inside the belly of the beast, it is a forum of unconditional criticism.

It’s in good faith obviously. People see an idea and critique it to the edge of existence with the desire help or further an idea; but it becomes a tick/tock that pulls the original idea apart beyond recognition.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything productive come out of the comments on HN, ever. It’s just a slew of people who say you can always do better after taking a long look at your idea, assuming your intended goal is perfection.

The irony is present because of the poster. It is explained by the contents of the post, not by the thread order in which it resides.

:) This is nice closure for engaging less though, sincerely. I see I’ve fallen victim to this mindset with this very comment, in its own irony.

I am curious, if HN discussion too critical then what is better out there? HN is less cynical and critical than other mediums, X, Substack, Medium. On HN at least it’s more of an intellectual people who see criticising out of spite as waste. Criticism is constructive comparing to other platforms where it is mostly to make critic feel smart or belonging to some side or group. On HN every commenter stand on their own intellectual merit, so to speak.

The original comment already contained its own irony, directing unfair criticism at critics. Hemingway wasn't exactly some impartial observer of human behavior here. He was butthurt that a published commentator once said something bad about his writing.

The reality of military operations, which Hemingway himself probably knew having served himself (though maybe the situation has changed as I can't claim familiarity with the specifics of how it worked over a century ago), is that the biggest critic of any unit involved in a battle post-battle is the unit itself. Every action is always followed by an after-action review, in which you go over what went well, what went wrong, what you should continue, and what you should change. It's neither unrelentingly positive nor negative. It's honest.

But for whatever reason, much of the creative class seems to think anyone who isn't able to do something themselves is universally unqualified to comment on the work of others. Plenty of rather obvious examples show this to be ridiculous. The top coaches and trainers throughout history were rarely great athletes themselves.

It is miles better here for sure. If I were wanting to garner criticism from anywhere, this would be an intellectual and respectful crowd for it.

I like the tightly curated communities of discord, but that comes with its own obvious problems. I don’t have a great answer unfortunately.

Which is perhaps a hint that I ask for the impossible, lol.