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.