> 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.
This a community. Was there a "we think we may have a gratuitous negativity problem" discussion?
Thin end of the wedge, perhaps. I hope not.
(From the article) "Too much gratuitous negativity might be the difference between someone giving up on a crazy idea and building the next Airbnb."
If negative, anonymous feedback here disuades and disenchants them, what hope is there?
Are we going to have a Safe Place section of the site, to protect applicants from all bad things?
Bad things happen. Mean people will say mean things on the Internet. Life is hard.