This is not twitter, with its tiny little snippets of text, which are useless for meaningful communication, and its culture which incites groupthink. This is not Reddit, with its hostile, hate filled voting system, with its peer pressure laden culture. This is not Facebook, literally designed to drive hate, and anger, and upset, to increase engagement.
This is Hackernews. It's not perfect, but it's far more palatable. And it's certainly not like any of the above.
Lastly, my advice still applies. When I detect hate here, I ignore it. When I detect peer pressure, I don't care.
Your two comments here could each fit in a Tweet and Reddit has basically the same voting mechanism as HN. There is also plenty of groupthink here too. That was basically the reason behind my comment to see what distinction you are making. People here seem to often deride social media while pretending HN is not social media.
HN is effectively just Reddit with only a few subreddits and moderation that is stronger than average, but within the range you will find on certain subreddits.
Well, there is hate and then there is criticism, and lots of people confuse the two, to the point where they just label any critics as "haters". Hate is worth totally disregarding, but criticism, as long as it's genuine and done in good faith, it's probably valuable.
One of the problems is, if you're .. I don't know, say in your neighbourhood. Or maybe at a small local gathering. You do something which deserves criticism, or mild, but polite rebuke.
You hear it a few times.
Online, you may hear 100k of the same, and most of the politeness and empathy is gone. It's all about scale. About reach. And about the more of that there is, the less empathy there is.
This is Hackernews. It's not perfect, but it's far more palatable. And it's certainly not like any of the above.
Lastly, my advice still applies. When I detect hate here, I ignore it. When I detect peer pressure, I don't care.