▲ 503 points

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

philippdubach.com

by 7777777phil·7mo ago·458 comments·view on hn ↗

458 comments

OP's classifiers make two assumptions that I'd bet strongly influence the result:

1. 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.

OP here :) On skepticism being lumped with negativity: partially true. The SST-2 training task treats critical evaluation as negative sentiment. I should clarify that "negative" here means evaluative or critical, not hostile. HN's culture of substantive critique registers as negative by these metrics, but that's arguably a feature of technical discourse rather than toxicity.

On the neutral category: the model outputs continuous scores from 0 to 1, so neutrality does exist around 0.5. The bimodal distribution with peaks at roughly 0.0 and 0.95 reflects how HN users tend toward strong evaluative positions. Three-class models could provide additional perspective, and that's worth exploring in future work.

Also love your meta-observation. Imo your comment is critical, substantive, and engaging. By sentiment metrics it's "negative," but functionally it's high-quality discourse. But that's exactly how I read the data: HN's negativity is constructive critique that drives engagement, not hostility.

There's a lot of legitimate criticism, but they're also a noticeable amount of "reply guy"-ism (pedantry that can sometimes derail the conversation and bring nothing of substance) and "pet peeve syndrome" (people who'll always repeat the same criticisms of a product or company even if completely off-topic for a submission). It would probably be hard to classify them. And whenever I go on reddit I see that both are enormously worse on there.

I was about to make a comment about skepticism, thank you for adding it. Its likely that its all bunched in together. Looking at material with a critical eye is a positive feature of HN not a negative - thats a very very nuanced thing to evaluate though and likely we do not have the technology

I’m not sure if this is the exact model used by OP, but it appears close, and it classifies your comment as positive at 99.9%.

https://huggingface.co/distilbert/distilbert-base-uncased-fi...

There also is some conflict of interests. VC investors and marketeers obviously want to nurture optimism. And that is entirely understandable and very likely necessary for good ideas to be spread.

While engineers, especially those that like to share knowledge and open source solutions are far more critical of monetizing products.

Overall HN doesn't lack criticism, since there many technically minded people around. But I like the mix to be honest and agree that skepticism is often seen as simple negativity. Sure, you probably don't want to advertise your product as "pretty decent, but there are numerous better theoretical solutions".

HN is not the rest, it is not the majority. It's for a specific tech-savvy social category. This category does want skepticism and criticism because they tend to be perfectionists. This is not "negative sentiment" anything but very positive "evrika!" sentiment for members of the aforementioned category.

Would one say: nice attempt trying to tell people how they are supposed to feel around here?

You comment is very interesting observation. Its made me reconsider some things about sentiment analysis. You are right its not really that HN is negative its that sentiment analysis doesn't really have any way I can think of offhand to measure meaningful discourse rather than GOOD/BAD/NEUTRAL

I've never done any sentiment analysis outside of hobby tinkering. Maybe there is some HN experts that will chime in on how to deal with it?

> The comment I'm writing right now is critical, but is it "negative?" I certainly don't mean it that way.

It's a matter of perspective. The OP is a negative post. You are negative about it. Therefore, you have made a positive post.

Exactly, critical thinking is framed as a negative sentiment in that analysis.

Negative posts that I post tend to do better than neutral or positive ones. I have a classifier that judges titles on "most likely to get upvoted" for which "Richard Stallman is Dead" is the optimal title, and another that judges on "likely to have a comments/vote ratio > 0.5" [1]. The first one is a crummy model in terms of ROC, the second is pretty good and favors things that are clickbaity, about the battle of the sexes, and oddly, about cars.

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

I've seen the same with comments (both negative sentiment and shorter length). Short, snarky, negative comments [0] normally get a much better response than well-reasoned, longer-form comments.

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

> What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs.

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

We self filter for negative responses because negative content is functionally interactive whereas positive content is functionally complete. Agreement is silent, users keep scrolling if they agree. Disagreement demands expression. Just a theory I don’t have data to back this up.

Back when Reddit allowed API access, I used a reader (rif) which allowed blocking subreddits. I did an experiment where I would browse /r/all and block any subreddit that had a toxic, gruesome, nsfw, or other content playing on negative emotions (like a pseudo feel-good post based on an otherwise negative phenomena). After a few years, and hundreds of banned subreddits, my /r/all was very wholesome, but contained only animal or niche hobby related subreddits. It was quite eye-opening on how negative reddit is, and also revealed how boring it is without the kind of algorithmic reaction seeking content.

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.

> What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs. The usual. It’s worth noting that technical critique reads differently than personal attacks; most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic.

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.

Ah, nothing can beat that old combo of ranting and/or correcting someone on the Internet.

As an ESL person one of the first internet-related terms I learned was "flamewar".

EDIT: ESL -> English as a Second Language

In the preprint they write:

> ... 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.

Negative bias has been observed in all forms of media. What would be unusual and newsworthy would be if hacker news was an exception to this.

Engineers are employed to fix problems, so they have an inherent disposition to break things down into pieces to identify what's working and what's not working. I've had the opportunity to demo our engineering tools to professionals at industry-type events, and they all came to our booth with arms crossed, even before they understood our value proposition. We demoed the exact same tools to the maker space and everyone who came to the booth was flowing with positive energy. Basically a glass half-empty vs half-full type of experience.

The value I get from negative comments is usually higher.

My usual journey: I visit the comment section and then look for the first top comment that criticizes the core thesis of the article.

I bet for most of us there’s a baseline positivity to everyday life that, because of how durable it is, is not really considered news. Thus newsworthy topics tend to skew negative.

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.

I was just writing about this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46508115 (edit: although I was thinking about comments, not submissions)

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.

To try and overcome my own personal tendency towards negative criticism on HN, I try and reframe my comments from "why this won't work" to "how can we make this work".

Not a panacea, and I'd be interested to hear others ideas on how to better comment and give feedback.

What would LLM's make of normal human conversations if they had access to everything you say (Just wait!)? Think back to the last time you hung out with a group of friends, either in person or online. How much of what was said would an AI bin into positive, negative, or neutral categories?

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.

> most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic

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.

A lot of people are commenting on the conclusion but I'm surprised no one is commenting on the methodology? The distributions given by the models seem weird. The LLM's enough so that I would just discount those and focus on the BERT models, but even then roBERTa for instance seems to suggest there is NO positive sentiment, with only scores of 0.5 and above given. Then there is the axis which is "ai_sentiment" against the classification, but it's not clear what "ai_sentiment" is, and it's not expanded upon in the paper. It seems to basically just map to the DistilBERT score apart from a few outliers?

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).

Related threads on overwhelmingly negative comments: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40430263 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32400521

I’ve noticed that my short comments that express cliche HN views get upvoted more than the long unique ones that I feel are more interesting. And in general, many top posts and comments are cliche.

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.

Because wisdom stems from burnt hands, and wisdom is extremely valuable. Positivity simply has a lower value to the reader. Maybe we should create good.news.ycombinator.com and see how much less interesting it becomes?

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!

I find it hard to mark something as negative when it's valid criticism. I'm of the opinion that if you cannot handle criticism, then you can't put yourself out there. This is coming from someone that is having a hard time putting themselves out there because I know I'm going to be wrong on certain topics.

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

dang's explanation sums it up nicely:

> 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!]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40430263

Isn’t this the major takeaway from the entire social media era of the last 20 years? Content that triggers strong emotions, especially anger, fear, and moral outrage, reliably increases engagement.