Every active social media user has an opinion. When you are a content creator, you’ll come across plenty of online users that offer comments, opinions, and feedback on your platform and its offerings.
It can be exhausting to manage these comments, especially when they aren’t positive and constructive. If you aren’t cautious, their opinions could have a huge impact on the mental health of human moderators and your brand image.
Some of these responses may often include hate comments, which, while being quite unwanted, are an inevitable part of community spaces and discussion venues.
However, just because you expect a small amount of hate from user-generated comments does not mean that you should ignore them. It’s important to regulate these kinds of responses for yourself and the rest of your online community that genuinely believes in your services and products.
The only way to effectively deal with haters, fans, and critics is to identify them and understand the right ways to respond to them. Comment moderation is one way you can effectively deal with such hate comments. The experts at Viafoura can help you learn more about comment moderation tools and how to use them.
Haters Vs. Critics Vs. Fans
It’s important to understand the key differences between the members of your audience that respond negatively to your platform.
Critics are qualified experts offering thoughtful suggestions for improvement of your work.
Fans are people following your work. However, they aren’t qualified experts in your field or subject. So, they might have negative or positive comments on your work.
Haters are people who bear malicious intent towards you and your work. They don’t comment to provide feedback or criticism. But, their sole aim is to attack to provoke you.
Constructive Criticism Vs. Hate
The process to provide a valid and well-reasoned opinion about someone’s work is constructive criticism. It could be either positive or negative comments. Still, these comments are often made with positive intent and in a friendly manner and not in an oppositional way.
A critic gives you specific insights and suggestions about your work. It is helpful for you in several ways, including:
- Showing the ways for improvement of your work
- Helping you understand the way your audience perceives your content
- Helping you in understanding your audience better
- Showing the details to improve work quality
- Provoking ideas to expand work
- Offering helpful methods to increase your skills
On the other hand, hate comments are online user-generated comments by people who passionately dislike your content. Hate is pure negativity. They might present these hate comments with lines such as “with all due respect” or “I mean no offense,” but they don’t intend to help you out in any way.
The hate comments aren’t from users who care about your work or want you to improve. Their only outcome is to ruin your day or vent their negativity in a public space.
Constructive Criticism Is Helpful For Creativity
It is a blessing to have genuine, helpful, and passionate critics by your side. You shouldn’t take every single word they say as the ultimate truth. But, when they provide you with specific, thoughtful, well-reasoned, and valid feedback, its usually a good idea to at least consider what they’re saying.
Nobody is perfect, so take constructive criticism as the words of an assistant or a coach. It can provide you with a new outlook and offer a different impression to broaden your perspective.
In addition, being humble to receive criticism and extracting value from it are the vital foundational creative skills crucial for self-improvement.
Don’t Listen To Haters
No matter how many improvements, changes, or corrections you make in your content, haters won’t be pleased with all. In reality, such responses are the result of their internal issues.
The hate comments often include:
- Insults
- Personal nitpicks
- Generalization
- Challenges
These aren’t at all criticism but an attack in the true sense. The haters don’t intend to help you improve creative standards, point out flaws, suggest ways to improve, but provoke and belittle you.
How Do Hate Comments Feel And The Right Way To Deal With Them?
Haters can show up at any time, no matter how good you are at your work and how good your platform is.
People would advise you to “Just ignore it” when you get hate comments. But, this is the kind of advice that misses the heart of the matter. After all, we are humans and with feelings and it is only natural to feel bad about a mean comment.
Logically, the haters are probably jealous or spiteful. You should rise above them and strive to avoid letting them get to you.
Try not to focus too much on understanding hater negativity. Reading something negative about yourself without any suggestions on improving is not helpful in any way, so don’t struggle to “just ignore it”. Instead, handle hate comments in following ways:
- The foremost step is to process the emotions you experience when you read a nasty hate comment. Whether you are sad, frustrated, angry, or even feeling anything else entirely. While it is true that you need to ignore their comments, it isn’t healthy to ignore emotions in any way. Allow yourself to process whatever you are feeling at the moment.
- Next, you get to select the members in your online community. So, choose who is allowed to share their voice in your online space- constructive criticism or haters. Delete hate comments and block the haters immediately.
- Invest in automated comment moderation tools to review comments as these get a life. This powerful, AI-driven technology works to delete inappropriate, abusive, uncivil, and harmful comments quickly.
- Once you have processed the hate comments, move on. The more you deal with hate comments in the right way, the easier it gets to let it go. You have to let haters go. They don’t deserve your energy, attention, and peace than you already had spent on them.
Conclusion
You should have a respectable following when you have an online community that grows with every passing day. Some could offer constructive criticism, while others are just the haters who hate your work and probably hate you too.
Constructive criticism is the analytical and stable approach to an argument. Whereas hate comments have an oppositional side rooted more in emotions and express anger.
Don’t let haters ruin your day or stop you from publishing your content; handle them in the right way. Always remember, dealing with haters becomes easier when constructive criticism outweighs hate comments. So, focus on good work and self-improvement skills rather than haters.
