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Comment by jaggederest | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, haters are some of the most passionate users, if you can do even the smallest thing to demonstrate a desire to improve, they'll often be huge advocates over the medium term.

I was working at a startup and we got some frustrating and hostile feedback from a user, I responded by acknowledging the issue and sending them a beta build that attempted to fix their issue. (it did not, but...)

Just reaching out and trying to engage made an enormous difference. They ended up contributing significantly to isolating and fixing that specific bug and others in the future, and referring us a few customers to boot, if I remember correctly.

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You've not met a real hater if you think this, and should consider yourself very lucky. That was just a frustrated user.

A real hater will obsessively use your product, yet simultaneously attempt to find any reason whatsoever to hate your product (or you), no matter how small, and be extremely vocal about it, to the point of founding new communities centered on complaining about you. Should you address the issue, they will silently drop that one from their regularly posted complaints and find or invent a new one. Any communication you send to them will be purposefully misinterpreted and combined with half truths and turned against you.

Some of these people probably have genuine mental illnesses that makes them act like this.

Just to be clear, this particular user didn't ever become a fountain of sweetness and light - they were pretty touchy and cranky at the best of times, if I remember right (it's been over a decade), but accepting them as they were let them become a contributor instead of toxic.

Honestly I have thick enough skin that I'm happy to let them be themselves as long as we can reach a basis of professionalism and get a positive result.

You're right that there are many people you can't reach, and trying is a waste of effort, but I think an appreciation for human dignity requires me to at least make the attempt, and sometimes you're rewarded.

Yeah, which is why I think it's important to draw a line between a frustrated user (has genuine issues with his use of the product, can be turned by fixing them), a casual troll (reposts some bad feedback because he thinks it's funny) and a hater (malicious, bad faith, communication not recommended)

With my old saas app (now sold, and then the new owner killed it) I used to love getting angry emails. Almost every time the user ended up turning into an advocate and product champion. I don't know if they were "haters" per-se but they were almost always suprised to get an email back from a real person who cared about their concerns, and over time they changed their opinion. That may just be an artifact of early saas in 2010. Not sure if the same thing can happen these days.

I've seen pathological users like the sibling is commenting about. I don't want to out any community in particular but some of subreddits surrounding open source games can get pretty yikes.

Not saying you're wrong to find silver linings, just wanted to corrobate that sometimes that is insufficient (as far as I can tell, given impassioned haterness germinating for years).

Indeed. If someone hates your product, at least they care. Indifference is much harder to work with. My experience of dealing with haters:

https://successfulsoftware.net/2024/02/25/it-might-be-a-good...

I think an important thing to add is that users don't always know how to properly complain. So a difficulty is figuring out what they actually want. They're on the outside looking in, so don't know all the details but they can express that they have a problem. It can often be hard, and frustrating, to figure out what that problem actually is but if they're communicating then it is usually not too difficult to diffuse the situation. As long as they feel you are trying to understand.

Another part is that we're breeding a society of Karens. "The squeaky wheel gets the grease". The wheels not squeaking aren't getting regular maintenance or care. No one is incentivized to ask nicely but people are strongly being incentivized to scream. To generalize outside software: a loyal customer gets standard service but Karen gets a discount or something free just to make her go away. It's natural that we do that but it's the wrong reward system. When you reward a dog when they stop barking they only learn to bark.

Agreed, I'm always trying to improve my communication skills and I think it's actually the core difficulty of modern society - as, honestly, it has been since Socrates talked about what we would now call existential loneliness.

People hate because they care. There's some exceptions (like bandwagon hating), but the people who hate on something the most tend to be people who want to like the product.

Exactly, they bought into the promise but the product didn't deliver. If a user expects your product to suck, you won't surprise (anger) them by being sucky.

Yes, it's often more frustrating to see a product with high potential fall flat than a shitty product be shitty.

Nah there’s the entire class of content creator haters. Product is unimportant. They just get new item every episode

In those extremely rare cases (so rare that they should be ignored), why would you make your product easier to hate. Make the product so good and communicate with such disgustingly sweet love that crazy people will move somewhere else.

It’s useful because those people act as unpaid marketing. Mentava used this well.

Agreed, I’ve experienced that myself. But I’ve also experienced the opposite: the user who always complains, doesn’t think things through, refuses to consider how their ideas would impact other users, doesn’t follow instructions…

In some cases, had I had the power to do so, there are a few users who I’d gladly have “fired”: offer a full refund in exchange for no more support.

You have to be careful in that your haters may not be representative of your overall population. Optimizing the product for them may create a worse product for everyone else.

Thats because most complainers really need their egos soothed more than anything.

You’ll also great some of the greatest feedback from them too.

Critical and constructive is a great combination

Don't fix what's making you bundles of cash :-D

Haters can be like bombs. You want to defuse them. Don't shake 'em. Don't drop 'em. Just render them safe. It's possible there's some gold in the ore; there might be, and if there is, accept it gratefully; but it's often hard to tell the constructive true-believer from the vindictive maniac. Your #1 job is to make it all inert, and to be able to walk away without an explosion destroying the business, social-media explosion or otherwise.

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