The default position of HN is skepticism

In my opinion, this is because there isn't a downvote button on stories.

Because there isn't a downvote button on stories, posting a comment that disagrees with the premise of the story has become the de facto "downvote" button.

It's easy karma to get, all you have to do is disagree with the sentiment of the post with barely more detail than "no, I disagree".

Then, when people come into the comments to argue that they don't agree, they see that there is already a comment that says essentially what they want to say so they upvote it.

The newest type of default comment that we're starting to see is the "disarming comment". On reddit this showed up as pun threads. I'm not sure exactly the form they will ultimately take here, but they're usually pretty highly rated as well. In any contentious thread there will be supporters by way of upvotes, detractors by way of the critical / skeptical comments, and people who attempt to make peace with comments that are either light-hearted or attempt to be conciliatory.

It's not just an HN thing though. Any community has these sorts of behaviors. It's just that there isn't a default way for someone to register their disagreement in the same numbers of ways there are for them to register their agreements; especially since comments that do nothing more than agree whole-heartedly with the submission and add nothing new to the conversation tend to stagnate or get downvoted.

The community values articulate cleverness, and sometimes folks optimize for this by trying to be more clever than the author of the article under discussion.

The easiest way to move community norms is to write the comments you want to see on the site. (I'm trying to be better at this myself.)

I took your challenge. The top 5 posts, in order:

1. "There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it". Top comment: jacqquesm. Character: sceptical ("Nano machinery is real, it exists, it powers the world, it's called biology.")

2. How to minimize politics in your company. Top comment: abalashov. Character: critically supportive ("There are certain problems [...] that simply cannot be solved or mitigated entirely"; "A few points to add:")

3. Rapid prototyping as a burnout antidote. Top comment: riffer (but admittedly only 16 minutes ago). Character: supportive ("Yes, this really works...")

4. Apple seeking to patent spyware. Top comment: ubernostrum. Character: "sceptical" ("vicious lying stinking reeking bullshit FUD")

5. HTML5 presentation. Top comment: sofuture. Character: meta-sceptical ("I don't have a better answer, and I'm not even saying HTML5 is the wrong path, just pondering!")

That's 2 out of 5 which are basically in support of the article, 2 out of 5 which are sceptical of the article, and one (the HTML 5 presentation) which doesn't address the article so much as address a trend which the article exemplifies.

Given that giving a sceptical response is much easier than giving a vote-worthy non-sceptical response (the latter requires specific domain knowledge, the former doesn't, necessarily), I think that's a pretty good ratio.

Sorry for the sceptical response. :)

1) I don't read HN for the stories, I read it for the insight the community brings to a topic. I will often upvote an article that I disagree with, but that still brings up interesting questions. Maybe others do this.

2) Sometimes there is just less to discuss when you agree with a submission, apart from adding your own piece of anecdotal evidence.

3) It's important to challenge ideas and to be able to call bullshit. People are good at that here.

Skepticism is generally the rational position - unless the evidence contained in one article is overwhelmingly conclusive.

The whole idea of the Scientific Method is to not believe something until proven. Just flat out believing anything you are told without questioning it is what leads to flat-earth maps and golden chariots pulling the sun across the sky.

Not true currently. The top comment of two of the top five posts are supportive:

Rapid prototyping as burnout antidote, riffer: "Yes this really works"

Things I've Learned from Traveling Around the World for Three Years, acabal: "I can attest that everything in this article is true."

Irony prize: There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it, jacquesm: "For those that are skeptical about nano machinery, google 'ribosome' and be amazed." Skepticism about skepticism! Perhaps he counts double for the purposes of your argument :)

I have a theory as to why the default HN attitude is one of skepticism.

Here's a quote from an article from Philip Greenspun, who company's board (ArsDigita) was taken over by VCs:

....But for most of this year Chip, Peter, and Allen [the suits] didn't want to listen to me. They even developed a theory for why they didn't have to listen to me: I'd hurt their feelings by criticizing their performance and capabilities; self-esteem was the most important thing in running a business; ergo, because I was injuring their self-esteem it was better if they just turned a deaf ear. I'm not sure how much time these three guys had ever spent with engineers. Chuck Vest, the president of MIT, in a private communication to some faculty, once described MIT as "a no-praise zone". My first week as an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student I asked a professor for help with a problem. He talked to me for a bit and then said "You're having trouble with this problem because you don't know anything and you're not working very hard."

http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/

(I found this from a link in the footnotes of pg's essay "A Unified Theory of VC Suckage" http://paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html)

In many areas in the hard sciences, maths and engineering, when you are wrong, you are wrong. No discussion. Many on HN have a background in these areas, hence their skeptical attitude to things that are fuzzy or as yet unproven (such as in the marketplace). People here often seem to assume that whatever is being discussed in a given article is dubious (or bullshit as the case may be). I believe this is healthy. The opposite attitude leads to all sorts of problems.

The default position seems to be we're supposed to applaud certain things automatically... anything YC-funded, any attempts to dislodge Flash using js/canvas games that are garbage by post-1980 standards, ridiculous stuff with CSS.

Some of the stuff and companies applauded on here are in my opinion really, really weak. There's no downvoting of submissions so you can only express dislike in a comment.

The highest rated reply to this comment will disagree with what I've written here.

I think it is generally a good thing as long as it's not skepticism for the sake of skepticism, without any substantial argument.

To illustrate this, I've often found myself totally agreeing with an article until I read a rebuttal from an HN comment which helped me put the article in perspective.

  But I certainly would like to see more top comments that agree with what
  the poster said, or expands on their argument.

There are plenty of those, but it's easy to mistake them for sceptical comments. Questions, side notes, alternate interpretations, etc. are expansions of an argument, into territory not covered by the original post. When someone starts a comment with 'However ...' or 'I mostly agree, but ...', the remainder of the comment is usually supportive, constructive and littered with tidbits that add to understanding of the point under discussion. However, simply due to the way the argument starts, we view it is 'criticism', because it sets itself up as countering the article, due to the use of an 'inverting' word/phrase, like 'however' or 'but'. There's probably a word for those words and this effect in English, but I don't know it.

People are more likely to post when they disagree with something because what is there to say when you are in full agreement? "Spot on! You rock!"? That kind of non-informative comment HN frowns upon.

Not that I disagree with you. :-)

I sometimes wonder if there are camps or cliques forming on HN. Sometimes the top voted stories are junk (sorry), and may have been submitted and voted up by Group A users. Group B users then voice their opinion of the submission in the comments, with the best of these negative comments getting voted up.

It would be interesting to see the data and trends behind submission upvoters and comment upvoters.

> In general, this is a good thing as taking the skeptical position forces a minimum degree of critical thinking, which makes that comment more useful.

One thing I've noticed is that comments which basically start off with "Bullshit" followed by a heated, not obviously wrong rebuttal tend to get a lot of upvotes.[1] And it can still accumulate upvotes even after another comment has shown that rebuttal to be wrong, and not even wrong in a good way.

Default skepticism is a good thing, but I think we're overly susceptible to assuming that anything resembling a righteous debunking from another HNer is right.

The other thing I've noticed is that if a submitted article isn't popular with some faction, but seriously damaging criticisms have not been forthcoming, then a comment demonstrating that a non-critical claim is wrong, or merely uncertain, will tend to get highly upvoted and treated as if it justified dismissing the whole article.

[1] Recent example: back in the New App Rejection Reason thread, the most downvoted top-level comment initially had 9+ karma, and had the structure I just described. Thankfully, more thoughtful people showed how it didn't make any sense, and it quickly got downvoted into oblivion. But a good number of people got fooled.

My impression is that HN readers write more intelligent and critical comments than other places.

I gave up on Slashdot back in 1999 because, back then, I was somewhat aware of what was to be biggest drop event for domain names in history. A certain story was a link to a clueless article about the topic, and the comments were dominated by people who knew nothing but sounded authoritative, so they were getting their comments voted up.

Then I thought about it and realized that the information I had was commercially valuable, why the hell would I share it with a bunch of people who couldn't tell right information from wrong information.

The drop event came, our detection system worked, and we grabbed 6000 names that we wanted before anybody else.

I think it goes along with having a mostly technical / programmer audience. It reminds me of a saying (not sure origin):

"When crossing a one-way street, a normal person looks one way. A good programmer will look both ways. A good tester also looks up."

Something I noticed quite some time ago is that any sufficiently long comment thread on HN will converge on a semantic argument.

I must say that I love it this way. I see a headline that seems interesting, and there's a discussion, I read the skeptic first comment before all else, because it usually states quite clearly what the author of that headline is trying to sell. It's Anti-PR. I find this useful in more than one way.

I think part of it is just the nature of what gets posted here. One could make the argument that articles favor sensationalism for the purpose of link-bait (or a less cynical argument might be that they subconsciously favor sensationalism to stand out from the crowd), but if a large portion of "news" is inherently inflammatory/hyperbolic, then I think a skeptical response is both warranted and natural.

Also, a lot of articles that get posted here are technical blog entries whereby someone makes a pronouncement on the positive or negative effects of some technology/methodology. These are fundamentally opinions, and will immediately garner a response from someone who holds a differing opinion.

I'd wager this doesn't happen though on things which are truly laid out in front of us as a great idea/ argument/ event that has no perceivable flaw or downside. I think it is healthy to be sceptical by default though otherwise you end up with close enough is good enough. Things that actually need work/ refining are given unreserved praise and that discourages future pieces on the idea.

Interestingly enough if you go onto search yc and check the top submissions ever by karma most of the top comments are what you are looking for more of. The difference there are that some of those posts are defiantly great and don't warrant that level of skepticism.

My gut feeling (and this is completely not scientific) is that Hacker News tends to have a large percentage of people who are contrarian... which kind of makes some sense since if you were just following the crowd then you'd probably not be on HN, or possibly not even a hacker.

But the end result is that people take a lot more pleasure in showing that they can debunk or argument against something. Saying: "I totally agree" may feel a bit like you are following someone else's thought, and most people here take pride in thinking differently.

I also think patio (HN values cleverness) is another important factor.

I think HN proves that skepticism + optimism = entrepreneurism! Skepticism in using critical thinking to question everything, including the standard way of doing things. Skepticism leads to new insights in improving the way things are done (wrongly or rightly). Optimism kicks in and the HN'er runs off to build the new tool that will facilitate this new insight.

Alas, entrepreneurism!

I believe the term "skepticism" is, many times, just a curtain to hide plain and simple ideological bias.

But this is not exclusive to HN. Reddit is the same, although in a more leftist way, while HN has more conservatives. But it is funny how each place has its own paranoia and conspiracy theories.

My default view on anything is skepticism. I imagine that most HNers, being critical and logical thinkers, have similar positions. The abundance of skeptical posts makes sense to me.

I always thought a healthy dose of skepticism was considered a good thing. We can't always take what we read at face value.

It's going to be skepticism, of course.

When someone comes up with a new idea, it's up to them to present it. If they fail to, only skepticism will result. If they do well, there will initially only be skepticism and a few people who 'believe'. 'Belief' is not scientific. You have to wait a while for confirmations to come in, and a fast-moving news site like HN is going to drop the story before confirmation has had time to happen.

That's just life.

I just looked at the top three articles and the top comments are all positive.

Hear hear!

Prove it