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
Lancepilot
@busmark_w_nika 😂 Very Common Thing i see almost regularly!
Haters Gonna hate, They Hate us, Because they ain't Us 😁😎🔥
To the Haters >😘😘
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@istiakahmad I wish to have this care-free approach towards them :D
Dial
the G2/Trustpilot point is the one that actually stings, on your own social you at least have moderation tools, but a bad review sitting on a third party site becomes the first thing a prospect sees before they even talk to you. we've found the only real counter is just outnumbering it with real reviews over time rather than trying to get any one review removed.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@omri_ben_shoham1 AppSumo is the same. But you would be surprised on how many people fake comments there also in the favour of companies :D
Maybe ive just hardened to people like that just focus on the good and not the bad negative energy consumes you, you have people on this thread that support you.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@richard_romero2 I have heard one good advice. When people are too harsh, just close the laptop for a while :D
@busmark_w_nika yep i agree
The thing that helped us most was separating "is there a real point buried in here" from "is this just someone venting." Pure hate with no actionable claim, delete it and move on. But some of the harshest-toned comments we've gotten turned out to have a legit bug report inside them, and we would've missed it if we auto-deleted based on tone alone.
The G2/Trustpilot situation is genuinely harder though. One angry review sitting alone reads as truth. The only real fix is volume of honest responses, not fighting the bad ones.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@nolan_vu How would you manage that thing with the G2/Trustpilot reviews?
@busmark_w_nika Thanks for asking! Honestly, the G2/Trustpilot thing is rough because you can't just "respond your way out" of a single scathing review sitting at the top.
What's worked for us is proactively reaching out to satisfied customers and making it dead simple for them to leave a review — like, one click, no login friction. Volume of honest responses is the only real antidote. One bad review at 4 stars average hits different than one bad review at 4.6.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@nolan_vu that's probably the best solution: beat bad reviews with good ones.
Over time, I’ve noticed that some profiles specialize in posting hateful comments.
I imagine these are people for whom this is the only way to feel relevant.
So, when I receive a hateful comment (which, like many others, has happened to me), I check who it’s from—looking at other comments they’ve posted, and so on.
If the criticism is justified, I reply without trying to defend myself, simply explaining the situation; however, all too often, the criticism is pointless and baseless. The best approach is to ignore it and focus on replying to relevant comments (whether positive or negative).
In fact, I’ve often started a reply to a negative—or even very negative—comment by saying, "You’re right, but..." and then explaining my point of view or the reasons behind a particular decision or action; sometimes, this leads to a more constructive discussion.
As for those who only want to get noticed by posting unjustified hateful comments—ignore them. Generally speaking, these people will find another target and vent their hate elsewhere. Replying to them just gives them a thrill :)
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@franckolv_dev Have you experienced hate comments also here, on Product Hunt?
@busmark_w_nika No, I haven't submitted any products to Product Hunt so far, and that’s not where I encountered unpleasant comments. It happened on a Linux users platform where I’ve been active for a long time; when I shared an AI agent project—which was free, mind you—some people felt entitled to criticize it without even trying it out.
There was one valid criticism—that I hadn't gone into enough technical detail for it to be understandable—which I acknowledged and explained, and then everything was sorted out.
Fortunately, other members weren't as harsh; as for the two or three truly hateful ones—after looking at other comments they’d posted—it turned out they were habitual, mindless critics. They don't do anything themselves, yet they think everything others do is rubbish! It’s pointless wasting time on people like that...
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@franckolv_dev That is a very frustrating situation; sorry to read that. Probably we need to filter those reviews better as some people are here just to be harmful.
Running several small products solo, the filter I use is whether the comment contains a testable claim. If someone says the product is rubbish, that is noise and I let it go. If someone says the export breaks on large files, that is a bug report wearing an angry costume, and those have been some of my most useful reports. Answering it calmly in public also does more for trust than any marketing copy, because prospects read the reply, not the insult.
On reviews you cannot remove, the reply is really written for the next reader, not the reviewer. Acknowledge the specific issue, say what changed, and date it. A page of polite, specific replies under harsh reviews reads better than a wall of five stars.
One habit I would add: never reply the same day if it stung. The draft you write angry is always the wrong one.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@oshylabs The last point is very useful, I usually tend to be very prompt, but it is a fact that the comment is highly influenced by emotions.
@busmark_w_nika Yeah, the emotion part is the trap. When a comment stings, the instinct is to fire back and defend, which reads worse in public than a slower, plain reply. What helps me is writing the public response for everyone else reading it, not the angry person, and moving the actual fix to email. Glad it was useful.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@oshylabs Good point – other people see your responsiveness, but anyway, I would be careful with that because the crowd effect can work with bad comments too (people just join the hater)
As a small team, we've started looking at comments a little differently. Instead of asking whether they're positive or negative, we ask whether there's something we can learn from them.
Sometimes people don't express their frustration in the best way, but there's still a real pain point underneath. If multiple people are confused by the same thing, that's usually a signal that we need to improve the product or our messaging.
Of course, abusive comments are a different story. But honest criticism, even when it's uncomfortable, has probably taught us more than praise ever has.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@nancy_2choo I agree, that we should look at the constructive ones... but you know what people are like... sometimes offensive :D
Coming at this from the support side, we build tooling there, so I see the angry messages as a queue rather than as comments.
The thing that surprised me most is how much of the anger is about waiting, not about the product. The same complaint arrives polite when someone gets an answer quickly, and furious when it has been sitting for two days. The bug did not change in between. The silence did.
Which means a chunk of what lands publicly is not really feedback about the product, it is the second attempt. Someone wrote in, heard nothing, and went where they knew you would look.
So before replying to a public one it is worth searching your inbox for that email address. Quite often there is an unanswered message already sitting there, and that changes what you should say. Apologising for the wait lands very differently than defending the product..
Does not help with the pure trolls, obviously. But it moved more of ours out of the hate bucket than any wording change did.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@jernej_jan_kocica For sure... but some people are just pure attention seekers :D And I am trying to do my best to prevent any dissatisfied users. (Just by doing the best product and providing the best customer support).
Mine mostly isn't hate, it's a community boundary I walked into. I build photo-based color and makeup analysis, and beauty communities have a hard rule that you never "type" someone who didn't ask – so early comments that read as hostility were people defending a norm I hadn't respected yet. Separating those two changed how I answer: real hate gets one polite line and no second reply, boundary pushback gets a product change. The second kind is worth more than any compliment. (disclosure: siOsi is mine.)
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@aktivist Comments that are constructive are welcome :)
The bit I'd add is about who actually volunteers. Angry people write reviews without being asked. Happy people almost never do. So a review page isn't a sample of your customers, it's a sample of the ones you upset, and moderation can't fix that because the problem isn't what's on there, it's what's missing.
Which is why the volume point a few comments up is right but harder than it sounds. You don't get volume by waiting for it. The happy ones are genuinely never coming on their own, so you have to go ask them, one at a time, usually right after something good just happened to them.
On G2 and Trustpilot, I'd stop trying to win on ground you don't own. You can't outrank them there and arguing in the thread makes it worse. What you can do is have enough of your own customer stories on your own site that anyone who googles you finds those as well. Right now that angry review is the only thing about you with any detail in it, so it wins by default. Not because it's true. Because it's the only thing there.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@venkat_a2 For sure, now, I am asking already happy users to rate my product as best as possible :D Because harsh times can struct and I need to be prepared :D
@busmark_w_nika Smart to bank them before you need them. One thing I'd watch though: a good average and a good story defend against different attacks.
The rating gets you past the first filter, so it's worth having. But when a detailed angry review lands, nobody reads it and then goes to check your average. They read the specific complaint and start looking for whether anyone else hit the same thing. A 4.8 can't answer that. One customer describing the same situation going fine can.
So while you're asking, I'd try to get the reason out of them rather than just the number. What they were unsure about before they started, and what turned out differently. That's the sentence you'll actually want in six months.