> If negative, anonymous feedback here disuades and disenchants them, what hope is there?
Absolutely. See Dropbox's Show HN, the slashdot iPod announcement, and every other worthwhile product ever. As a community we're pretty bad at picking successes.
People are also erroneously overrating things all the time. The problem with our predictions isn't a skew to negativity, just the normal inability to predict the future due to lack of knowledge.
There's also a definite survivorship bias (and an equally strong failure bias) to remember only the outliers. Most ideas fall squarely in the middle and we promptly forget about them.
Absolutely. See Dropbox's Show HN, the slashdot iPod announcement, and every other worthwhile product ever. As a community we're pretty bad at picking successes.