Why is there so much snark on HN?

Snark, I think, correlates positively with terseness, and terseness correlates positively with upvotes - it's much easier for someone to read a short comment and say "Yes, that's it" than a very long one. So there's both a prevalence of those comments higher on articles and an effective pressure to make those comments.

(There are other things that correlate positively with terseness, like outright insults, but also strongly correlate negatively with upvotes. Or there are things like pun threads, which are popular on Reddit etc. but are just culturally unpopular here, for some reason.)

Same reason there's so much snark on the Internet as a whole. Easy to criticize behind a mask and from a distance. Fun to troll to see others get bothered (and ignoring who might get hurt)... The signal was never that strong and as net usage has gone from rare to just part of society, the S/N ratio has collapsed. It's just a means of finding people like yourself, amplifying your thoughts and feelings and identifying targets.

While HN tries, it's sorta like Facebook, Slashdot,... Just social media.

As a programmer, I learned to always be looking out for corner cases that might cause problems. Pointing those corner cases out to others, could be mis-construed as snark.

Everyone’s just bored. It’s intellectual flirting. Except there’s no fucking, but maybe a few good ideas cum out of it.

Anonymity, people don't hold back when there's no reputation to lose.

Didn't notice snark, but people here think are too important. I get it has to do with their profession and social status in life.