Lol what a typical comment for today's HN. Condescending ("just plain wrong") with a jab ("this isn't a hugbox") placed in just to remind you that not only are you perceived to be wrong but you've provoked anger. No proof to provoke the jab, no feedback to help fix what you perceive as wrong sentiment analysis. Just thoughtless condescension and anger. Why is the sentiment wrong? Is this a data analysis trap the OP fell into? Nah let's insult the OP instead.
In my experience having run a bunch of different sentiment models on HN comments, HN comments tend to place around neutral to slightly negative as a whole, even when I perceive the thread to be okay. However I've noticed a huge bump in negative sentiment on large HN threads. I generally find that absolute sentiment doesn't work in most corpuses because the model reflects its training set's sentiment labels. I generally find relative sentiment to be a lot more useful. I have yet to do a temporal sentiment analysis on HN but I have a suspicion that it's gotten more negative over time. I agree with another poster that I think HN needs to be careful to not become so negative that it just becomes an anger echo.
Relative sentiment on this site between topics is something I've done and the obvious results show. Crypto threads are by-and-large negative, most political and news related threads are also highly negative.
Cynicism is perceived as more intelligent [0]. I personally find the HN brand of discussion to be difficult to bs my way into. But no matter your level of competency you can always find something to criticize and feel you've contributed. I wonder if academia or even "more intelligent" discussion in general would be counted as more negative.
As someone who is not an academic myself, but likes to listen to podcasts where academics discuss issues with each other, I often find that the conversations feel contentious, and sometimes they are, but the vast majority of the time the academics themselves feel like they're having a perfectly cordial and productive conversation. So I do think there is something to the idea that academic discussion comes across as being negative.
Sure, there's the 20% of comments that are outright rude, or tie everything back to their pet grievance (job satisfaction, government surveillance, the existence of JS).
But beyond that, the technical conversation has a negative, critical edge. A lot of comments come from the angle "You did something wrong by...", or only reply to correct.
There are still golden comments, and most personal anecdotes are treated respectfully, but it makes for an intimidating environment.
In my experience having run a bunch of different sentiment models on HN comments, HN comments tend to place around neutral to slightly negative as a whole, even when I perceive the thread to be okay. However I've noticed a huge bump in negative sentiment on large HN threads. I generally find that absolute sentiment doesn't work in most corpuses because the model reflects its training set's sentiment labels. I generally find relative sentiment to be a lot more useful. I have yet to do a temporal sentiment analysis on HN but I have a suspicion that it's gotten more negative over time. I agree with another poster that I think HN needs to be careful to not become so negative that it just becomes an anger echo.
Relative sentiment on this site between topics is something I've done and the obvious results show. Crypto threads are by-and-large negative, most political and news related threads are also highly negative.