How do you deal with hate comments about your product?
As someone who manages social media, I also have to manage what happens in the comments section.
Sometimes it's constructive criticism. Other times it's pure hate.
People often say that once your product starts becoming successful, more people notice it, and some will criticise it simply out of jealousy.
This is my POV on how I handle that:
On social media, we (or I) remove abusive or hateful comments immediately for two reasons:
They can put your account at risk of moderation or platform restrictions.
They create a bandwagon effect – once one person starts insulting your product, others often join in, and one community manager can't keep up.
We encourage constructive criticism to go through our customer support email instead. There, we can properly understand the issue, help the customer, and resolve it internally.
The toughest situation is dealing with negative reviews on platforms you don't fully control, such as G2 or Trustpilot. Those reviews are much harder to manage and have a longer-lasting impact.
In general, we remove non-constructive hate because it often comes from people who are simply looking for attention online. (Probably they are bored on the internet.) 🙂
Constructive criticism is different – we respond, educate, and use it to improve the product.
How does your company handle negative comments and reviews?
Replies
To be honest it does not bother me having worked in the public sector for 20 years i just smile and say thanks for your input and move on there will always br haters hiding behind a screen and keyboard.
Lancepilot
@richard_romero2 indeed XD
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@richard_romero2 yes, but when someone is swearing on your person, you will not likely to thank them :D
@busmark_w_nika Honestly, I think hate comments are still better than no comments at all. Silence can mean no one noticed or cared enough to react, while criticism fair or not, at least shows that the product is reaching people. I’d remove anything abusive, take whatever useful signal I can find, and treat the rest as noise.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@hun_kim True. It is a sign that people are noticing you.
Good thread, Nika. Most answers here are about what to do with the comment, so I will take the half it has not touched much, what it does to you. The asymmetry is the real problem. One hateful line outweighs ten kind ones in your head by the end of the day, not because it is truer but because attention is wired to weight threat over praise. So the skill that matters is not moderation, it is not letting the loudest negative voice quietly become the one setting your mood, or worse, your roadmap.
The trap I watch founders fall into is replying to win against someone who was never going to engage in good faith. It feels productive and it is pure leak, every minute there is taken from the people who already like what you built. Answer the ones with a real point in the open, since the quiet readers are learning how you handle pressure more than they are reading the insult. Let the rest pass without renting them space. Your calm is part of the product.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@asadmalik901 I try to do that, but I need to delete those very impolite with swear words, it doesn't look good under the public product/company page. + Handling such comments since the early morning is really awful.
@busmark_w_nika That is a fair exception, and deleting pure abuse is not the same as silencing criticism. Slurs and swearing on a public company page are not feedback, they are noise that makes the space worse for the people reading quietly, so removing them is hygiene, not defensiveness. The line I try to hold is simple: if a comment has a real point buried in the tone, it gets answered in the open, and if it is only tone, it goes. You are curating a room, not censoring a debate.
The part I would protect is the early morning. Opening the day by wading through that sets your head to the wrong thing before you have done anything you actually chose to do. If you can, batch it into one slot later in the morning instead of letting it be the first thing you touch. The abuse reads as smaller once you are already moving, and your first hour stays yours.
Three things we learned building something that reliably provokes people - we make an AI that answers your phone calls, which a fair slice of the internet finds dystopian on sight.
First, and this one cost us: the most useful feedback we ever got arrived in an unacceptable tone. Calm feedback tends to come from people who already decided you are worth being polite to. Rage comes from people whose expectations you actually violated - precisely the group that knows where your product breaks. Sort by tone and you systematically discard the signal from your most disappointed users. We now sort by whether there is a falsifiable claim inside, not by how it is phrased. "This is garbage, it hung up on my mother" is rude and actionable. "Love the vision, excited to see where this goes!" is lovely and worth nothing.
Second, the distinction that changed how we respond: hate at your product versus hate at your category. A lot of what looks like hostility toward us is not about us at all - it is people who object to the whole idea of software answering a phone. That is not a bug report, but it is not trolling either. It is a values position, and you cannot support-email it away; trying to "resolve" it treats someone's worldview as a ticket. Those get one calm, non-defensive public reply, and then we let it stand. The audience for that reply was never the commenter. It is the quiet readers deciding whether you are a company that argues with its critics.
Third, on your G2/Trustpilot point, which I think is the genuinely hard one: redirecting everything to support email has a hidden cost - it moves the resolution somewhere nobody can see. The public record keeps the complaint and loses the fix. On surfaces you do not control, your visible response IS the product for everyone reading it six months later. So we flipped the order: reply publicly first, briefly and specifically, then take the details to email. Same resolution, but the next 500 readers get to see that something happened.
Fully with you on deleting abuse, though. "We delete cruelty, we do not delete criticism" is a line worth stating publicly, because saying it out loud is what buys you the benefit of the doubt when you do remove something.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@getosmo To be honest, in moments like that, I wish not to be a public person and be totally private. I do not have the mental capacity to handle their hate speech :D
What I've actually noticed from watching bigger creators, is that some of them save their hate comments on purpose.
Instead of deleting, they screenshot and save them in a file, then later turn them into content. For example, in Instagram create a post "They said nobody would use this" over a milestone accomplishment, that kind of thing. The hate becomes proof of the journey, and ironically those posts often outperform their regular content because people love an underdog arc.
Obviously that only works for public-facing brands with thick skin, and abusive stuff should still go. But it made me rethink the instinct to erase negativity completely. Sometimes it's raw material.
I'm still early with a small following, so most of this is ahead of me. But I am curious does anyone here actually reuse criticism as content, and has it worked, or backfired?
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@satchmo_saunders This is a good preparation hack for making it successful later. Probably will start practising it.
If someone is taking time out of their day to give their thoughts, there's usually a reason even if it's poorly articulated.
I quickly bucketize into one of two groups:
1) Is this critique useful/fair? OR
2) Is this because they don't understand?
There you know whether you have a product issue or a communication issue. Turning a problem into a solution should be priority - don't fall into the trap of being defensive or you'll waste your time fanning flames rather than extinguishing them.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@danielboardman There is also third category: People do not have anything better on work (we also receive comments from people who are just trying to be funny on the internet – their purpose is purely: "I am a hater, and maybe I will get tons of likes on this comment." AKA attention seekers.
@busmark_w_nika True. As much as I'd like to imagine these people don't understand the problem/solution and it falls into communication, the truth is just that haters are gunna hate sometimes.
I divide hateful comments into three categories. First, I always remind myself to stay calm and remember that some people comment as if I had personally attacked them:
1. Constructive comments that help me learn something
2. Ignorant comments written by people who only want to spread negativity.
3. Unreadable comments filled with pointless hate based on subjective reasons
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@marius_stoicescu Why are we (company) getting so many of those from the 3rd category? 🤣
@busmark_w_nika Let me tell you my experience from the last 3 days: I posted my application on Reddit in various subreddits, everything was ok and I said I should also post in groups in my country, my language, :) and there tons of hate... why? - to answer you without getting banned I can't :)
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@marius_stoicescu Sometimes it is better to skip our native countries. I am from Slovakia and I can bet that the mentality of our people would be the same :D
@busmark_w_nika I’m from Romania, neighbor :)
The category you are in decides how much of this you get. I work on tools in the AI writing space, and a share of the hostility arrives before anyone has opened the product. It is aimed at the category, not at the thing I built. Learning to tell those two apart saved me a lot of pointless rewriting.
The test I use now is whether the comment contains a fact. "This is garbage" has none, so there is nothing to act on. "It broke when I pasted a long document" has one, and that person is doing free QA in public, even if the tone is rough. I answer the second kind in the open every time, because everyone else reading the thread learns that a real bug gets a real reply here.
On the platforms you do not control, what helped was volume of honest reviews rather than fighting the bad ones. One angry review sitting next to four detailed ones reads as an outlier. One angry review on its own reads as the truth.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@abdullah_javaid3 I mean that the second one comment has some feedback that has a potential for your product improvement... those are good. But those from the 1st category (unusable) started appearing under our ads quite often.
@busmark_w_nika The ads part is a different problem from the rest of this thread, and I think that is why it wears you down more.
Organic comments come from people who went looking for you. Ad comments come from people you interrupted. A lot of what lands under a paid placement is a reaction to the interruption rather than to the product, and you would collect a version of it whatever you were selling. That is a property of the channel, not a verdict on minimalist phone.
The practical part is that you do not have to read them. Meta and Google both let you set a blocklist at the ad account level, the built in profanity filter plus your own keyword list, and anything matching gets hidden automatically before it reaches you. Hidden also beats deleted there, because the person still sees their own comment on their end and does not come back angrier about being censored.
That gives you the early morning back. The ones with something real in them still arrive, the rest never load.
SlimSnap
Solo founder, so I don't have a delete button. No owned community, no moderation. On HN or Reddit the comment just sits there and I live with it.
The ones that got to me weren't hate anyway, they were half right. Got called AI slop in a thread once. English isn't my first language so I use AI to clean up my writing, and someone clocked the smoothness.
Denying it would have been stupid. What worked was saying the plain thing: non-native speaker, AI fixes my grammar, the data and the questions are mine. It died right there. The defensive version would have run for days.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@bickov I recommend to build a community, they can stand behind you when you once need it :)
Scarlett.
Good question, Nika!
I see the logic behind this strategy, but I don’t think negative comments are always a bad thing. Every product or service has weaknesses, so a completely positive comment section can sometimes feel less authentic.
To me, a company shows real maturity when it responds calmly and constructively to negative feedback instead of simply removing it. A good public response can sometimes build more trust than a positive comment.
I also think having a closer community, for example on Discord, can help a lot. It gives users and customers a place to communicate directly with the team, share feedback, and feel that their concerns are actually being heard.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@byalexai I agree that calmness will help. First, I wanted to be calm and really politely replied, but some people are doing "swear word" comments just for fun, acting like desolates and there is no real dialogue that can be lead with them.