There is nothing to worry about. I do think it is indicative of a certain kind of new diversity friendly, "safe space", slightly censorious attitude which is rooted in normal human group psychology, keeping the tribe safe and secure and also swayed by whatever flavour of popular radical politics is operating at the time. It's nothing new. I wouldn't worry about this affecting Hacker News but if it does, we will notice the discussions becoming stilted, people will self-censor and there will emerge other places where people can feel more comfortable with their own voices. We are far from that day. That day might not ever come, HN is too small in my opinion.
I wonder though - how (if we take it to unlikely worst case scenario) would it affect how the behaviour of certain well known personalities such as Richard Stallman, or Linus Torvalds is viewed in the future where any form of negativity is censored against?
Does that even follow, though? HN's community has traditionally (thankfully!) flatly rejected the "safe space" PC game whenever it's attempted to be played here, either in the comments or the submissions.
Remember that the guideline is against "gratuitous negativity", not "negativity" in general. HN will still be a place where actual crap gets called crap, but hopefully this means that we'll see less middlebrow criticism and more actually substantive comments.
> HN will still be a place where actual crap gets called crap
I daresay that this is the problem. When one has the option to say "I think this isn't good from perspective X, because of thing Y", and one says "this is crap", one is being unconstructive and mean.
To say that something that someone did or thought is "crap" or "rubbish", the way I see it, is just needlessly inflammatory. I think a lot of people conflate being inflammatory with being frank and straightforward. "Look at how non-PC I am, I told it like it is!!"
The truth is option A above is just as frank, but much more civil, and isn't creating enmity when there isn't cause for any.
I was purposefully using "crap" as shorthand, there :)
In detail, I don't see HN ever being a place where legitimate (in other words, well articulated) criticism gets deflected or discouraged on the grounds of being mean or unfriendly. At the end of the day, if you have learned something factual about what you've done, it should not be discarded just because the usual social niceties were not provided.
Think of a Show HN post for an obviously slapdash and insecure web service of some kind. I'd fully expect the comments to contain almost nothing but proclamations of how the author is doing it wrong.
I wonder though - how (if we take it to unlikely worst case scenario) would it affect how the behaviour of certain well known personalities such as Richard Stallman, or Linus Torvalds is viewed in the future where any form of negativity is censored against?