Haters (2020)
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
Today, Suhail Doshi, founder/CEO of Mighty (and previously the founder/CEO of Mixpanel), tweeted [1]:
This week I've witnessed some of the most rude, mean spirited, dismissive people. I suspect IRL they're much different.
Meanwhile, there's been an outpouring of support, encouragement, and optimism to counter-act it all.
My team & family appreciate it. All fuel for fire.
I gather much of this happened in the HN thread [2], which included this gem [3]:
This is like a parody of the current state of affairs in modern web development. Except it's actually serious.
Sigh. I am so disappointed in our industry that tools like this even need to exist. It really makes me want to quit programming entirely
I guess it's up to all of us to reflect on our reactions to new products/concepts, and consider what it says about our own place in the world, and exactly what kind of "help" we want to offer to those who are expending effort to try and make something better.
[1] https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1388377957895315458
The thread had its share of both.
The top comment was reasonable and Suhail replied to it with an interesting perspective.
PG's point is that the more successful you are, the more "haters" you'll attract, in addition to fanboys, reasonable supporters and reasonable critics, and that a key to surviving the rollercoaster of commercial success is being able to identify the haters from the rest and avoiding letting them hold you back from doing good work.
EDIT: People are objecting to the sentence in the original version of my comment that the linked comment "wish[ed] for personal harm". Fair enough that that can be seen as an inflammatory interpretation.
For what it's worth I consider people angrily wishing for your company to go bust, which can often lead to personal impoverishment and career/reputational damage to the founder to be equivalent to a wish for harm to them, but I don't need others to agree with that.
I understand that a side effect of a business failing is that the people working for the business lose their jobs. But if anything, that argument would apply primarily to the employees of the new product, not the creator. The creator understands that a new business is a venture - an attempt, not a guarantee - and that for many reasons it could fail.
And, more generally, it seems like an awful slippery slope to characterize wanting some other business to not succeed as a desire to harm anyone. Suppose I agree with Suhail's goals but also I think I can execute on the idea better and I start a competitor. If there's only enough room in the market for one winner, and I want to be that winner, am I now wishing harm on Suhail too? Suppose I start a business that competes with some old-school giant ripe for disruption. Am I attempting to cause personal harm to the C-suite of that business?
This is exactly what people are concerned about with Paul's article. Once you get comfortable painting some critics as "haters," it's easy to dismiss all critics that way. Haters and fanboys do not spring up from the quantum foam; they might not present their arguments in the best way, but if you have an overwhelming number of one or the other, there's quite possibly a reason for it.
Anyway, it doesn't matter what you or I think about this. As I said in another comment, the ability to discern between valid criticism and hate is one of the most important skills a founder/executive can have, so real world outcomes matter far more than arguments about it here.
All the essay is saying is that some critics cross over into being haters, and where that is the case they can be ignored. It's up to practitioners to discern what is and isn't hateful. People chiming in here saying "some criticism is valid and shouldn't all be dismissed as hate" are not disproving the article's thesis or saying anything PG would dispute.
I think there's a clear answer for what can be more hateful - hoping that the person fails hard because of who they are. I saw none of that in the comment you linked. The hope is that the company fails. That is a valid position to hold!
Again - if I say that I'm going to enter your industry and do a better job of it than you have such that my company succeeds, is that "hateful"?
I get that much of the rage is focused on the some variant of the complaint that the web is slow because of JS cruft or advertising or whatever. Fine, there's a place for a discussion about that. Mighty didn't create that problem. They're just offering a solution that problem for people who need the solution enough to be willing to pay for it. No need to wish for Mighty to "crash and burn" just for trying to offer one kind of remedy.
As I said, it doesn't matter what you do - the good founders will either read your criticism as helpful feedback and improve, or they'll recognise it as being from a "hater" and ignore it - perhaps being a little bit more spurred on to succeed. It's just up to you as to what kind of help you want to offer that founder.
As for your last sentence: in this discussion we're talking specifically about the kind of feedback that is levelled at the founders of nascent products/companies when they launch, when they're just trying to offer something new to people who might want to try it. But even aside from that, in my experience, people running companies aren't usually hoping their competitors "crash and burn" - people who think like that are ego-driven and don't make it very far. There's generally a sense of respectful rivalry between competitors in an industry, and usually one company hopes to succeed at the products they make, whilst other companies in the space focus on different products or market segments.
I guess it's all about whether your outlook is constructive or destructive.
Ultimately, if we're generally in agreement that it's not commendable to be a "hater", then all other discussion is fairly arbitrary.
Maybe I just don't get it. Do I automatically get a right for praise for pitching VC on Twitter along the lines of:
"Here is a concept of our 4 dimensional quasi-pan-crypto forced into illusion matrix via blockchain to take advantage of your unused memory to store valuable pieces of information. You get paid, when you hide other people's secrets."
We agree that it is not commendable to be a hater, sure. I think it is also not commendable to be unable to distinguish critics from haters.
So, the point that I can discern, and that you seem to be endorsing, is that this product has security and centralisation risks, and therefore it shouldn't exist and that we should hope that the company "fails and fails hard" and that they "crash and burn", and that the founders's work - years of hard work by a fellow hacker/creator - amounts to nothing.
OK, if that's the kind of critiquing that people think is beneficial and makes them feel good about themselves, good luck to them!
I believe this view (maybe pithily summarized as "people are corporations") is also the root of Graham's dumb article. If someone expends a lot of effort towards a bad idea and suffers "reputational damage" that's called consequences, not personal harm.
Meanwhile, I will continue hoping ~all of Peter Thiel's company's fail, which is not even a very controversial opinion on HN.
This essay is not about that. It's about people who attack a product/company/founder for reasons that are not about a product's functionality but are about their own issues.
This can be presumed to be be true of a critic who actively desires to see a founder's company "crash and burn" (leading to financial damage to them and their family if they have one), rather than just thinking it would be better for the founder to change their product or company direction.
For what it's worth, the personal bias I do have in this topic is in support of people like Suhail who are building products/ideas that seem crazy to most. The one I want to be working on, and that I earnestly believe could solve a lot of big problems over the long term, is one that even YC likely wouldn't fund/support, and that would certainly attract more resistance than Mighty. But that's for me to work through. I'm cool with where I'm at, but I’m going to keep having a soft spot for people like Suhail who spend years working on something that others think are crazy, as that’s the way the important problems (indeed, far bigger problems than slow websites) are going to be solved.
This seems predicated on the assumption Mighty is trying to make something better, or even at one level removed the assumption that Suhail Doshi thinks Mighty is trying to make something better. That's before we get into the unstated assumption about what the "something" is and if it should be improved.
If you're going to be launching stuff on the internet, you gotta have a thick skin for rudeness and personal insults. No amount of passive aggressive blog posts is going to change that fundamental aspect of the web/human nature.
You can stop right there - taking people on Twitter seriously is a bad idea.
it is a sad state of affairs that such a thing need exist. i think what we really need are browsers that limit resource usage thereby forcing front end people to actually think about performance.
People are obviously skeptical about the product and price point, but the majority also seemed curious.
But isn't this a valid concern? If we're at a stage that we have a thin client of a thin client we are correct to raise questions. This is Hacker news after all.
Why are the SV elites so quick to jump gun and claim victimhood when they face ridicule and criticism? We don't see the mom-n-pop shops that closed operations last week whine in such fashion.
> isn't this a valid concern?
"Valid" is such a low bar. It's supposed to not be mind-bogglingly boring, if there's a bar to pass. And I don't think it qualifies, but that's subjective.
"Raising questions" is fine. Using someone's product launch to throw a tantrum and say you "want to quit programming entirely" is not raising questions. The matter of why the web is slow is deep and complex. But I grew up with Windows 3.1, 95, etc, and they could be pretty slow too. All that is peripheral to the fact that Mighty has spent two years working on a product that is one possible remedy to this problem, which people can choose to use if they want to. Nobody has to use it.
> Why are the SV elites so quick to jump gun and claim victimhood
Most of the objections to this essay seem to paint the act of identifying "haters" as "claiming victimhood" or being unable to handle "valid criticism".
The YC partners and top founders all know that valid criticism is healthy and extremely important to listen to. YC's motto is "Make something people want" (they give you a t-shirt with it printed on it when you first walk through the door as a founder). The thing PG says to do more than anything else is "listen to your users".
Good investors/founders don't carry a victimhood mentality. If they do, they fail.
This essay is about understanding that some of the more extreme critics are not really critics but are "haters" and that where that is the case, it should be recognised, for the sake of the founder's sanity, which is a very precious commodity.
Retorting that founders should have a thicker skin about legitimate criticism is not refuting the essay.
The general analysis of this thread's comments show that people are not buying PG's simplistic arguments. A startup can have fanboys, haters, detractors, enemies, and many more types of critics but this article ignores that depth, nuance etc and goes on to paint an simplistic binary picture.
> " The thing PG says to do more than anything else is "listen to your users"."
Ctrl+F 'users' on article: 0 results found
> I am focusing on Raising questions, whereas you are focusing on the rhetorical quip
There is not a single question in that whole comment. It's just anger. "Rhetorical quip" is an interpretation that serves the argument you're trying to present, but it's hardly neutral.
> It is a well known fact that the web bloat....
The Mighty team is trying to address the issue of web bloat with a project that took two years, rather than trying to reprogram every website/webapp in the world, which would take somewhat longer. If people have actual practical ideas to share that would address the issue of web bloat rather than hating on one's own entire industry and spewing bile over another hacker's product launch, they should 100% share them and it would be great. I'd love to read good ideas on this topic. The comment I quoted didn't contain even an attempt to engage with this issue, it was venting and nothing else.
> in accordance to the hacker spirit
The hacker spirit I know of entails building things and improving things, and engaging seriously with other people's attempts to do so. The comments in the Mighty thread that do that are great. The ones I quoted/linked don't do that.
> you're emotionally involved with this topic
A few commenters have written variants of this, but it's deflection. My comments in this thread are mostly correcting factual errors. I'm happy to concede I have a soft spot for Suhail and hackers like him who build things that others think are crazy, because that's how important/difficult problems get solved. So, sure, that's my emotional investment in the topic. The comments I've quoted/linked are far more emotionally-charged than anything I've written.
> people are not buying PG's simplistic arguments
The emotionally charged, defensive nature of most of the negative comments are interesting, coming from people who are so keen to dismiss others as too emotional, but that aside, this isn't an essay that matters much if HN commenters agree or disagree; it's for people like Suhail and future founders, to help them discern between useful feedback and unhelpful noise.
> Ctrl+F 'users' on article: 0 results found
Terribly bad-faith comment. "Listen to your users" is the dominant theme of PG's essays and public comments for the 15+ years he's been writing/speaking about startups.
Anyway, my central point in my original comment was that we all need to reflect on the role we play when we critique others' work. We can help by engaging seriously with a fellow hacker's work and providing constructive feedback, or we can react with indignation and help them in a different way, by motivating them to prove the haters wrong. Either way we're still helping! It's up to us as to which path makes us feel good about ourselves.
If people really think they're living by the "hacker spirit" and offering constructive feedback with those comments I linked, that's fine, good luck to them!
Doesn’t mean it’s not going to work. Doesn’t mean that, if it works, that’s not a harsh indictment of the industry, or that if it becomes the norm it won’t enable worse (spying of various sorts seems like an obvious application of this, which maybe people wouldn’t be so upset about if it weren’t so damn normal for tech companies to head that way)
None of that’s mean to express, under the circumstances.
https://twitter.com/suhail/status/1387063023521595394/retwee...
That said, our future selves may look back with mirth at the HN commenters who wrote variants of "VNC can already do this".
Of course people would never say such a thing to you irl. But they do say such things about you.
That is to say, I’m not a hater by any regards.
But there is little of substance in this article. It’s not an exaggeration that the whole article could be summarized by one line: “Haters, like fanboys, are likely to be obsessive and should be ignored”. And given it’s been reviewed by the following, it seems like they all are so detached from reality that they cannot objectively provide meaningful feedback to the article.
> Thanks to Austen Allred, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Christine Ford, Daniel Gackle, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Elon Musk, Harj Taggar, and Peter Thiel for reading drafts of this.
In my own analysis side, perhaps the article, being devoid of meaningful content, is more telling of the author and his peers - the use of third person, the constant mentions of fame and celebrity status and perhaps the preoccupation with haters (why else write an article) may be an indication that they are becoming caught in their own celebrity worship.
It seems a celebrity worship culture continues to accelerate within mainstream conscious (Elon Musk’s tweets moving market prices for example), perhaps amplified by the scale offered by technology and the explosion of digital communication in the last 20-30 years.
There will always be inequality, but I believe from basic scientific principles, the differences between so called “visionaries” and “leaders” is not that much vs the broader population and that more equality, more “biodiversity” or spreading of opportunities for intellectual and practical contributions vs. a top down “here’s what’s good for you” approach is undeniably good sense and one we should actively aim for. I.e. less attention / admiration of those at the top and more mutual respect and community building. Fight for more decentralization and peer to peer solutions - the best voice is everybody’s voice!
The article does have more substance, for example exploring where the hate comes from. Of course, it does not seem relevant to you, because all you see from haters is a bit of flaming on forums. For famous people, this is a big pain point and worth the many words.
> And given it’s been reviewed by the following, it seems like they all are so detached from reality that they cannot objectively provide meaningful feedback to the article.
These are exactly the people having the problem! It's like calling someone to black to talk about discrimination against black people. This is very much a problem only these people get to feel the full extent of.
Actually you are right. It does cover off a bit on the source, and I brushed these points off as “common knowledge”, probably because I’m not affected by it so I assimilated that information when reading the article without attributing more value to it.
I still think it’s devoid of meaningful information, but that’s just a personal view on it, I can now further appreciate that it’s not a decisive “this is a bad article” to “others may take a different view on it”.
This is where the article lacks substance. It is mostly conjecture based upon attributed motivations. The article would have been much better, in my opinion, if it stuck to noting the similarities between fanboys and haters, noting why haters don't really matter, and making suggestions on the handling of haters.
Which this isn’t. Perhaps he did spend years reflecting on haters, but I agree with the grandparent post that his conclusions amount to little more than a few words.
given it’s been reviewed by the following, it seems like they all are so detached from reality that they cannot objectively provide meaningful feedback
...you're not on very solid ground.
Austen Allred was living out of his car and showering at the YMCA just a few years ago. Patrick Collision is from an ordinary family in Ireland, and Harj Taggar is from an ordinary family in England. Daniel Gackle is a humble employee of YC, and is routinely attacked in the course of doing his job. Even Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris and PG were "ordinary" people until having success with Viaweb (except JL) and then YC, not all that long ago. So they all know what it's like to be nobodies trying their best against all odds, even if they (at least some of them) are not in that place any more.
As for this:
the best voice is everybody’s voice
True this may be, but perhaps the most important difference between those who make a big impact and the rest of us the ability to be undeterred by the reflexive hate we inevitably attract when we use our voice to share something novel. With this in mind, perhaps the key to benefiting from more people's creative energy is to dial down the hate and be more encouraging towards anyone who is attempting to make a valuable difference.
(Sorry not quoting the entire point, not out of rudeness but due to its length). My point rather was that they are all successful and similar to Paul, so during their review they didn’t pick up on (in my opinion) the lack of content in the essay, which may be a reflection they are caught among themselves and not objectively evaluating each other - this could imply a greater predisposition to label criticism as “haters”.
> With this in mind, perhaps the key to benefiting from more people's creative energy is to dial down the hate and be more encouraging towards anyone who is attempting to make a valuable difference.
Agree 100%. There’s nothing positive that comes from hate, even criticism should only be provided if it has a chance of actually improving the end product (otherwise it could just be hate hiding as criticism), otherwise what’s the point of criticizing?
Perhaps. Or the other way of looking at it is that as professional investors/mentors of early stage founders, or founders/execs themselves, these people have a greater incentive than just about anyone else to be highly attuned to the difference between valid criticism and "hate", and that their career success will, to at least some extent, be an indicator of how adept they are at this.
Anyway, it seems we agree more than we disagree overall. Thanks for your reply.
I also think it's very easy for people to dismiss criticism as people being haters.
For example, you mention Austen Allred. He has been getting flak on HN and elsewhere from both random people and Lambda school students. To me (And seemingly some other people), he seems a bit detached from reality and based on his few interactions it seems like he either doesn't care or likely dismisses the criticism as people being haters.
> With this in mind, perhaps the key to benefiting from more people's creative energy is to dial down the hate and be more encouraging towards anyone who is attempting to make a valuable difference
The issue I see here is people lauding their vision in the face of criticism, effectively saying "you just don't get it" and labelling the people who criticize them as haters.
Personally, the only way I become a "hater" is when someone does what I just described. Laud their idea as the next coming of christ and basically refuse to interact with any criticism.
Yeah and before that they were infants who couldn’t even manage their own bodily functions and were unable to practice even the most basic impulse control. Perspectives change.
The problem, in at least some instances, might be that after the upbringing you describe they became extremely wealthy and isolated from the concerns of average people and lived that way for quite awhile.
If you do that for long enough you do, in fact, have a tendency to completely lose track of what it’s like to be a nobody. Sort of like how you probably aren’t as connected to shitting yourself in public and screaming for hours for no reason as you were at one point in your life.
If you don’t see how access to extreme money and power fundamentally changes people you haven’t been around people with extreme money and power.
Experience changes people.
I probably never would have made it on my own since I don't deal with either and it's not a problem I suffer, in a way anybody with a different point of view can teach us some, even if they were detached.
We’re on a website (founded by the author of the post!) where “how I became successful” posts abound. Western culture is filled with examples of famous entitled pricks who project themselves as the architects of their own success: Kanye West, Ellen DeGeneres, James Corden[1]… He has American citizenship; isn’t he familiar with the pervasive myth of the “self-made man, pulling himself by his bootstraps”?
[1]: Plenty of stories online from staffers.
Successful people are proud of their hard work, and usually they are right. But the smart ones among them notice that they worked equally hard at different projects A, B, C, and while project A was a success, projects B and C have failed, for reasons unrelated to how hard they worked, often pure luck. So they can imagine an equally hard-working person who just got unlucky with all their projects.
It's as if in return for your hard work you got lottery tickets. No hard work, no tickets, no money. But sometimes it's also lot of hard work, many tickets, and still no money.
Maybe the arrogant successful people are those who succeeded at their first project, so they believe the relation between hard work and success is automatic? Or maybe people who had enough of safety net, so they knew they can keep trying over and over again until they succeed?
I do think though there is probably a hate/love spectrum rather than the dichotomy presented here; but as ever its the extremes that generate most of the noise and toxicity.
Far more useful than whether someone is a hater or a fanboy is the amount of actionable information in the feedback.
Sometimes suggestions are wrapped up nice with grateful suggestions for improvement. Other times they're embedded in vitriolic tirades. Still other times, there's no actionable information at all. ("This sucks! You suck!")
But if someone tells you that you suck and should quit because this and that needs improving in your product... hey--that's free advice about improving your product, and maybe it's worth something.
Once you stop thinking about if someone's a hater and start thinking about how much help (or not) they're giving you, everything gets a lot easier. If a hater lashes out with no actionable information, then you don't need to take action. You knew they were out there, no big deal. You alone are responsible for your reaction.
But If a hater says you need to improve something, and they're right, improve it and make your product better.
And don't forget to thank them--they just did work for you for free, after all. :)
To me the far more interesting question isn't what to do about haters, it's how do you distinguish between haters and people who have a genuine point to make. Elon Musk attracts a lot of attention, he has a lot of haters, he also does a lot of things that are worthy of real criticism and he should listen to that criticism.
It's a question PG just completely fails to address, there's a certain kind of motivated reasoning here - I'm great and all the people who criticise me are just haters and they're bad and they're mean and they'll never amount to anything in life etc. My suspicion is that Paul doesn't actually know many haters, and he hasn't put much effort into getting to know what's actually going on, it comes across very much like this is just a nice way for him to think about the world - the nasty people are bad people and through some cosmic justice they're all unsuccessful.
In reality, the world is far more complex, and the framework of thinking about this that PG is putting forward probably doesn't do much to actually reflect that complexity.
This is an essay intended for a specific audience and narrow purpose. I think he intentionally doesn't add any caveats about how to deal with criticism in general. I think he knew there'd be a deluge of responses like yours; you're not the intended audience. It's not about criticism or critique. It's about a model of haters. It'd be a waste of space to waffle on about ways to handle feedback and how to distinguish valid and invalid criticism, etc.
He's talking past and above all of that. I'd find it condescending and tiring if he did do that; obviously he agrees with what you're saying here. He doesn't need to state the obvious.
If you've ever been a public figure or spent a lot of time seeing how public figures are discussed (especially online), the "fanboy" and the "hater" are very real archetypes. These aren't people praising or criticizing you. It's a certain kind of pathological personality type. And if you're the kind of person who's not used to having either, this is just a little guide to let you know it's very normal.
It's just some advice he's giving out to people who've found themselves becoming public figures.
Also, at the end, he does address your point to an extent:
>The mistake here is to think of the hater as someone you have a dispute with. When you have a dispute with someone, it's usually a good idea to try to understand why they're upset and then fix things if you can. Disputes are distracting. But it's a false analogy to think of a hater as someone you have a dispute with. It's an understandable mistake, if you've never encountered haters before.
He's trying to help people not think they're doing something wrong by refusing to engage with this particular kind of individual, because their natural tendency will probably be to get bogged down trying to understand and address what they think is a dispute.
And he additionally includes some of the should-be-obvious stuff in the footnotes (where I think they more naturally belong).
Same. But his critics loathe him. Derided as un-literary fluff.
That "elitism" is rapidly breaking down. A direct result of consumer internet applications at scale, as predicted in the early idealistic writing about the web. Any prestige-based institution is finding itself in competition with a cloud service. And it's not just young people tuning into TikTok instead of CNBC for stock tips. The entire concept of fame is becoming "based" ;)
IMO This is the only heuristics should be applied to Internet criticism. This article reads as if they're unable to handle criticism and instead of self reflection they create false dichotomies like fanboy/hater.
Using such a broad stroke (who's to say that someone is uncritical, etc.?) is an iffy process. Beyond the armchair psychoanalysis of the so-called haters, casting people as such is an opportunity to cast aside actual criticism. And critics is what people with an audience and a privileged status (e.g. economic, social, or political) will, and should, garner. Power should come with its own criticism.
This can be exemplified with the treatment of Musk' critics, who are more often than not labeled as haters. A quick, dirty solution that fits in today's social media driven PR environment.
This will only get worse in the next 5 (please not 10+!) years as haters truly and the Clash of Cultures go mainstream. But after the perspective is gained, we will have a more productive discourse online.
”Haters are just fanboys with the sign switched.”
Very sloppy writing Paul, very lazy.
But I don’t think Basecamp is like the simple model put forward here by Paul Graham, who is saying “if you’re famous you get fanboys and their opposite and that’s just an outcome of being famous”.
Basecamp and it’s founders have over many years taken extremely opinionated and contrarian positions, and it’s always been presented with an air of breathtakingly arrogant superiority. The tone of their communication has always to me seemed to be bursting with superiority and smugness. They haven’t just ended up with haters just because that’s what happens if you’re famous. They’ve ended up with haters because they almost appeared to actively be trying to create haters because they wanted to generate extreme opinions because it’s good publicity.
And now finally Basecamp founders have taken yet another contrarian arrogant position but this time it’s fallen flat and backfired severely. And now many former fanboys are haters and there’s no goodwill and all there is, is haters.
That sounds like maybe they weren't fans, but rather were happy (and wanted to amplify) that their worldviews/political ideologies aligned, and now that that's not the case on some issue, they switch to hate (and want to see it burn).
I don't think those were fans.
I think in another essay pg writes that the popularity contest stops after high school. This is false, at least in 2021. It continues and is played by the same people with the same high school tactics.
I suspect it is because the Internet has made it easy to connect and act like in high school. In the days of TV, one had to sit down and pen a physical hate-mail to send to a TV show host, which is more work and not coordinated with a hate mob.