65% of Hacker News Posts Have Negative Sentiment, and They Outperform
Posts with negative sentiment average 35.6 points on Hacker News. The overall average is 28 points. That’s a 27% performance premium for negativity. This finding comes from an empirical study I’ve been running on HN attention dynamics, covering decay curves, preferential attachment, survival probability, and early-engagement prediction. The preprint is available on SSRN. I already had a gut feeling. Across 32,000 posts and 340,000 comments, nearly 65% register as negative. This might be a feature of my classifier being miscalibrated toward negativity; yet the pattern holds across six different models. I tested three transformer-based classifiers (DistilBERT, BERT Multi, RoBERTa) and three LLMs (Llama 3.1 8B, Mistral 3.1 24B, Gemma 3 12B). The distributions vary, but the negative…
