What happened to HN? 

Not snarky; serious question. 

If one of the most interesting sites on the web can fall victim to widespread cynicism and pessimism, how can we avoid the same thing happening here in the future?

See also: Reddit. https://i.imgur.com/83bOv7K.png

Building /bright-moments - minting onchain art IRL | /purple #15 | FID 129 #magikarp

HN has always been notorious for believing they’re special geniuses & all else ahead of the game are somehow wrong & on the precipice of failure. It’s easy to sound smart by being a critic & tearing others down, hard to build against headwinds & succeed so their nature of criticality is sustained by occasional fail

BDFL of Quilibrium, Eng @ Farcaster, ex-Coinbase, always opinionated, never hydrated

/quilibrium

𝓵𝓲𝓿𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓮𝓷𝓭𝓵𝓮𝓼𝓼 𝓼𝓾𝓶𝓶𝓮𝓻 • building @buoy 🛟 • pfista.com

And it's reasonable to have those thoughts – thoughtful questioning and skepticism _is_ valuable. What I see on HN in threads like from OP is less about curiosity/skepticism and more about "nobody will ever use this/the underlying premise will fail" (Coinbase's "Looking for a cofounder" thread, "Show HN: Dropbox")

I feel like my default mode is “why won’t this work” or “why is this hard” instead of “how could this work”. 

Have to be intentional to stay in that positive headspace.