One time a project I made appeared at the very top of the front page. It attracted many negative comments. Some saying it was barely usable. Others saying I'd built it wrong, and offering half-baked advice on how I should have done it instead. That project later went on to get me lots of work and recognition, and even won me a few industry awards.

HN posters tend to be overly critical, often tripping over themselves to demonstrate how they're smarter than the creator of whatever it is they're commenting on. In my experience, they rarely are.

Negativity normally doesn't faze me. It's the insinuations of mental illness that hit me pretty hard. I quit the GNU bash mailing list after someone called my idea "schizophrenic", then like a year later I found out bash actually implemented a version of my library system idea.

Very often I think I'm insane because of the things I think. If it was so easy, much smarter people would have done it already. Then I write the program and it actually works.

> HN posters tend to be overly critical, often tripping over themselves to demonstrate

That's the helpful part though, as one of the only communities that is overly critical instead of too much on the other end of the spectrum like every other community. Criticism helps you refine and sometimes even see new perspectives, and the other chaff and useless comments you can just ignore, doesn't really matter, as your experience shows as well. Ultimately I think you get back what you put into the HN-machine.

I do agree LLMs water down human writings to a extreme degree and people should just wholesale avoid them except for very surface-level copy-editing fixes, like spelling mistakes. Don't ask for their feedback how something feels or if it's "dumb" or whatever, use your own intuition.