Comment by whoknowsidont
Comment by whoknowsidont a day ago
Not only is "it" not needed, "being a fan" is pervasive to a detrimental extent. "posio-paths" are everywhere and are basically the default. In order to say something correct, make a correction, or present a counter-factual you have to layer your tone with a thousand feel-goodism's and niceties.
Otherwise you just get labeled as a hater, a contrarian, or worse - a critic. It's exhausting. People confuse being direct, dry, or taking a level-tone with dispassion, disinterest, or again being a "hater."
I would even say I've seen so many people being "super excited" about something that it's the opposite of contagious for me, it causes me to doubt how knowledgeable or sincere they are about the subject (whether it's a general topic or even a person).
We have too much fake-niceness, and we are over-enthused quite often on things that turn out to be nothing, at least in the U.S. We don't need more of it, at least IMO.
> We have too much fake-niceness, and we are over-enthused quite often on things that turn out to be nothing, at least in the U.S. We don't need more of it, at least IMO.
I don't think the original article is advocating for "fake niceness". It's advocating for enthusiastic uplift. That spirit that tends to pervade small hobbyist communities, where everyone is iterating and building on everyone else. If you've been in the 3d printing space over the last decade or so, there's plenty of honest criticism and knowledgable discussion. But it's also infectiously enthusiastic and there's a sense of exploration and desire to see everyone* succeed that's very genuine. Things don't always succeed or work out, but it's pretty rare to encounter hard "that's stupid, you're stupid and you should feel bad" sort of commentary.
Compare this to the broader tech community as it appears in places like HN. Open any thread on someone's new project or experiment here and count the number of comments that are genuinely positive and encouraging vs the number that are nit-picking for the sake of nit-picking, dismissive and just generally unhappy or are outright actively tearing down the item in question. Even the ones that are "Oh this is nice, but hey you could do XYZ to improve it" very rarely have any follow up that submits the suggested improvements, even when the original item is an open source project that they clearly could submit improvements to. People love to talk about the shortcomings, but unlike "fans" rarely tend to put out the time and effort to make it better.
It's bad enough that my general approach to HN these days is to only read the articles and make an effort to avoid the comment threads or at a minimum make sure I've read the original link in its entirety and thought about my own opinions of it before heading into the comments. And when I find something in a project that I think could be improved, I make an effort to ensure that I'm putting proper effort into trying to improve it, either with a patch/fix or if I'm incapable of patching/fixing, as much detail and testing as I can document in order to have contributed more than just a drive by criticism.
Also, I'm not sure a "too much niceness", fake or otherwise, is the problem in the US right now.