[HN Gopher] When someone says they hate your product
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When someone says they hate your product
Author : jger15
Score : 50 points
Date : 2025-12-29 19:30 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.getflack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.getflack.com)
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| It's very hard to accept criticism; very hard. But OP's view is
| the mature, thoughtful way to go about it. Some people are going
| to be mad-as-hell, and they just will be. The analysis and advice
| is good. The initial response from the founder wasn't great and
| because we all like rooting for the underdog, there was a pile-
| on. Bad on us.
|
| But, just to see how accepting criticism works, it wasn't
| Dostoevsky who had that quote about happy families, it was
| Tolstoy. :-)
| chuckadams wrote:
| Shorter: "Don't take it personally". Also, people tend to dial
| down their flamethrowers once they see that you're listening.
| alansaber wrote:
| OP is wrong, ad hominem is the best way to both defend your
| intellectual integrity and also drive engagement
| ahoka wrote:
| What a stupid opinion.
| corndoge wrote:
| It is sarcasm
|
| edit: wait i get it now
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Pretty sure the one you're replying to is as well. :)
| nostrapollo wrote:
| In fact, acknowledgement of any kind is failure - report the
| truth as anything counter to the feedback, and tell everyone
| how much support your counter argument has by quoting numbers
| no one can verify (important)
| zephen wrote:
| 73.24% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
| tclancy wrote:
| They say sixty-five percent of all statistics / Are made up
| right there on the spot / Eighty-two-point-four percent of
| people believe 'em / Whether they're accurate statistics or
| not
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUK6zjtUj00
| doodlebugging wrote:
| RIP Todd Snider. He was real.
| cloche wrote:
| Taken from the Donald Trump School of Leadership I'm sure :)
| amortka wrote:
| The underrated trick here is separating "signal" from "status
| game." Even hostile reviews often contain one actionable
| invariant ("this workflow is brittle", "pricing feels
| dishonest"), and the rest is just the reviewer performing for an
| audience. If you respond only to the invariant (and maybe ask one
| concrete follow-up), you de-escalate without rewarding the
| theatrics -- and you also create a public artifact future users
| can trust.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Yeah. Even with good faith feedback, separating the signal
| from... whatever else is going on in the feedback-giver's mind
| can be a bit emotionally fraught. But you've gotta do it.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| We have more users than everyone you just mentioned (combined).
|
| That's my favorite part. When an organization dominates a market,
| it's possible that they're so much better than the competition
| that the market has full-force chosen them, but that's almost
| never the case. Usually, it's because they've managed to avoid an
| open market all-together, (e.g. through exploiting intelectual
| property protection, byzantine compliance requirements, exclusive
| contracts made without concern for end users, etc...) and there's
| no need to make the product good, making it far worse than all of
| the competition (combined).
| jaggederest wrote:
| 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.
| latexr wrote:
| 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.
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| 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.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| Don't fix what's making you bundles of cash :-D
| joewhale wrote:
| You'll also great some of the greatest feedback from them too.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| 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.
| 6r17 wrote:
| Frustration is the fuel for innovation.
| btmiller wrote:
| Interesting thought! In moments like these, capturing the
| innovation can be ignited by asking whether the comment was
| frustration or feedback, or said slightly differently "was that
| trying to be helpful or hurtful?". Tends to get the other party
| to rethink their words and produce a more productive dialogue.
| It's a tool we can all use both at and outside of work :)
| 6r17 wrote:
| I often use it as a self-reflection for myself ; i'm working
| solo so my exploration is really different - (thankfully I
| work on tools I use myself). Anger / Frustration can
| definitely be measured from text only - I don't necessarily
| need to "drive" a discussion to try to get an explicit
| confirmation of what is going wrong - that signal is a strong
| enough information to indicate for something important (or
| that the user is just mad). Being able to switch from mad ->
| chill is definitely the point where we can digest why
| something is happening - and depending on the context it can
| definitely underline important focus points to improve.
| ericyd wrote:
| Meh, CEOs response was bad, but I hate people with a burning
| passion when they express feelings like that about a product.
| Just stop using it and walk away and stop making it harder for
| other people to live. If you want to offer feedback then lead
| with that.
| avhon1 wrote:
| > Just stop using it
|
| Unfortunately, not always an option without making major
| lifestyle decisions (for example, software required by a job)
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Can't stop, they force us to use it
| https://ifuckinghatejira.com/
| eptcyka wrote:
| We tried it CodeRabbit. They enable beta features without
| asking, so one day your GitHub issues get AI responses without
| anyone ever asking it to respond to it. I think the criticism
| was warranted. I think it is OK to let people be passionate
| about the tools they have to use. Ultimately, we decided to
| disable CodeRabbit. But there were definitely some people on
| our team that felt like they were forced into using it.
| noplacelikehome wrote:
| Not every consumer of a service like CodeRabbit will be in a
| position to make decisions about the tools their org adopts, or
| even be involved in the relationship with the vendor. Are they
| not entitled to express exasperation in a public forum?
|
| The guy offered some pretty valuable feedback to help improve
| the product. Business idiots with ego problems can bury their
| head in the sand at their own peril.
| joshmanders wrote:
| > but I hate people with a burning passion when they express
| feelings like that about a product.
|
| Interesting choice of words.
| frizlab wrote:
| "Claude gets it"
|
| No. It does not. It does not understand anything. Stop
| anthropomorphizing bots!
| dboreham wrote:
| How do you know whether a human brain understands something?
| Groxx wrote:
| thank you for providing evidence that some do not.
| shimman wrote:
| Probably the same way that I can be assured your
| interpretation of red is mine.
| kshahkshah wrote:
| Some people are colorblind. Some people have more or less
| cones and rods. Our interpretation of colors is certainly
| not the same
| mrbungie wrote:
| You should steel-man the argument. GP is talking about
| qualia, obviously for the sake of the argument you assume
| the comparison is between two people with similar eyes.
| hyperhello wrote:
| Steel-man is such a weird expression. There are no steel
| men. How about saying "The opponent's best argument".
| nawgz wrote:
| The wild success of traffic lights disagrees with your
| statement.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| The wild success of traffic lights comes from having 3
| colors at fixed positions. You put those 3 colors in a
| single color changing light and I would assume the
| accident rate would measurably increase.
| evilduck wrote:
| The fact that a single emitter traffic light that simply
| varies its color doesn't exist also disagrees with your
| statement.
| inetknght wrote:
| The wild success of traffic lights is only wildly
| successful to those who aren't color blind. Do some
| reading.
|
| Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness
|
| > _The colors of traffic lights can be difficult for red-
| green color-blind people. This difficulty includes
| distinguishing red /amber lights from sodium street
| lamps, distinguishing green lights (closer to cyan) from
| white lights, and distinguishing red from amber lights,
| especially when there are no positional clues (see
| image)._
|
| Publication from 1983:
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1875309/
|
| > _All but one admitted to difficulties with traffic
| signals, one admitted to a previously undeclared accident
| due to his colour blindness, and all but one offered
| suggestions for improving signal recognition. Nearly all
| reported confusion with street and signal lights, and
| confusion between the red and amber signals was common._
| einarfd wrote:
| Colors and color names are culture dependent, and you are
| not guaranteed that people in different cultures agree on
| what color something is.
|
| The most famous of these discrepancies is Japan and green
| vs blue, or why does Jenkins by default use red, yellow and
| blue instead of red, yellow and green.
|
| So I would urge using something other than colors as an
| example of shared human experience.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Stop anthropomorphizing bots!_
|
| They hate that.
| willparks wrote:
| "Claude has been trained to handle this the right way"
| mock-possum wrote:
| I find the things I hate the most are the things that I want to
| like. What I hate specifically is the disappointment of seeing
| 'bad' when I expect 'better'
| hyperhello wrote:
| I work in a big company where everyone knows how to "accept
| criticism". What they don't know is how to fix the problems. The
| company here had a tweetfest, then a blogfest, then an apology
| fest. Did they even consider sitting down with a glass and
| looking at the product?
| JoaoCostaIFG wrote:
| The fake apology at the end makes this quite funny. "I was just
| protecting the team". "I learned many lessons". Etc. Good at
| marking this as a company to avoid.
| mattm wrote:
| Even the CEO's "apology" is pretty bad. He still finds a way to
| take shots at the original poster saying his original message was
| inflammatory (could also be read as how I'm justified in my
| response), that "he started it" and that the team was "spoken
| down to or treated dismissively" which they weren't. All the
| original feedback was about the project and was not directed at
| specific individuals.
| dogleash wrote:
| Even without the jabs he kept taking, it's such an empty
| customer service apology I don't think the CEO even understands
| why people were annoyed.
|
| > As a leader, I do not tolerate situations where our team is
| spoken down to or treated dismissively.
|
| You don't have any authority and haven't earned any respect.
| You're just embarrassing yourself.
|
| This reminds me of that meme of a dad trying to use the dad
| voice to discipline some random kids over webcam. It's the
| internet pops, not your neighbor's kids misbehaving at the
| grocery store.
| ortusdux wrote:
| Harjot's initial feedback reminds me of one of my pet peeves:
|
| If I reach out and say "I love that your product does X & Y, but
| it would be helpful if it also did Z", please don't reply with
| "Nobody needs Z."
|
| Tell me you will look into it, or it's out of scope, or hard to
| implement, or literally anything other than calling me a nobody.
| smithkl42 wrote:
| Complaints are amazing! I've said for years that you know you're
| succeeding when people start complaining. Complaints are a sign
| that users see something potentially valuable, and are frustrated
| that they can't get there. Even if you can't prioritize the fixes
| that would be required, you should still embrace them.
| silisili wrote:
| I often read reviews of places and things I'm even tangentially
| interested in. As a user, there's little more unprofessional to
| me than a company replying to negative reviews with anything but
| an apology, or offer to help or do better.
|
| So many places, especially local ones, take every sub five star
| review as an insult and invitation to argue. I'm actually shocked
| by the percentage of places that do this. It drives away my
| business, and I can't be the only one.
|
| Even not replying at all is a better strategy, IMO.
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