Sharp readers may point out that the HN guidelines have always excluded those things. That's true. But it's still enough of a problem in HN threads that this is a clarification worth making. We tried it out last year when we released special guidelines for Show HNs. It worked well there, so we're extending it to the whole site.

> The first link is a low-quality comment / ad hominem, the second link is off-topic / ad hominem. Both of those were already against the rules.

Although I wouldn't call this comment "gratuitously negative" or even "negative," I do believe it exemplifies one of the major root behaviors that lead to negativity (gratuitous or otherwise): failure to fully digest the conversation plus a reflexive desire to make a point.

First, as @dang pointed out elsewhere, this comment's point was anticipated and addressed directly in the original post:

> Sharp readers may point out that the HN guidelines have always excluded those things. That's true. But it's still enough of a problem in HN threads that this is a clarification worth making. We tried it out last year when we released special guidelines for Show HNs. It worked well there, so we're extending it to the whole site.

Even if the point were worth making, it was already made by @sama. Why assume the grandparent comment wasn't written with that very paragraph in mind? If you didn't read all of the original essay, why jump in to comment on whether the examples were appropriate or not?

Second, even if that paragraph weren't there, comments like this add absolutely nothing constructive to the conversation and risk starting an irrelevant debate over the semantics of "gratuitously negative" vs. "ad hominem" vs. "off-topic". Much more constructive would be, "When @sama said 'gratuitously negative' I was thinking more of comments like: <links to some comments>. To me these are different from the examples you listed because <reasons>."

Don't have any examples in mind? Don't have time to go look for them? That's fine — don't comment!

Honestly, I'd bet money that @sama added that paragraph specifically in an attempt to head off pointless top-level comments like, "Isn't this already against the rules? Look, here they are: Rule 3, Rule 14, and Rule 78(b)! Does @sama even read the rules of his own site? UGH."

All of these things pile up, leading to people responding reflexively to other people, who respond reflexively in turn, leading to...etc. etc.

The original comment was "how is this different from ad hominems?" and the reply with examples of gratuitous negativity were ad hominems, which was contradictory so I elaborated to see if anyone could provide more context, which dang did. (Yes, I missed the intent of the paragraph in the original submission at first.)

So I think informative examples would point out comments that many people think are okay but that the HN team does not.

A few comments are about the content of the post.

And then someone makes a comment about the blog CSS or the framework or javascript, wothout mentioning any content of the blog.

I get the impression that HN doesn't want those type of comments here.

Here's the example I was thinking of.