Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
I feel that whenever I scroll on a community that allows US politics.
I find it amusing when people try to analyse me. They spend all that time and effort only to be that wrong.
Anyway keep up the good work, you're one of the funny people here even if you're a Republican Chinese communist feminist MGTOW spy here to cause disharmony in utopia.
It’s interesting how negative comments affect me so much more than positive ones. I’ve definitely received far more positive feedback during my time here, but for every 100 positive comments, that one negative one really sticks with me.
I hear the same thing from artists and actors and celebrities in general. They say one bad review can hurt, even if the others are great.
The thing is that there is no way to please everybody, and even beyond that, some people can never be pleased! If you change yourself according to their complaints, they just find new complaints!
The trick is to pay attention only to comments that are trying to engage honestly, in good faith, from an informed perspective.
Which is easy to say and hard to do. I know. How do you know if someone is informed? How do you recognise reasonable-sounding bullshit? How do you recognise a grumpy bastard who is nevertheless saying something you need to hear?
I am surprised to be able to report, as a veteran of many online forums and 46 years of life, that it's possible! If you spend enough time just not responding to the comments that aren't being constructive or helpful, they actually stop being so visible in your mind. You may notice in the moment, but they do not hang around any more because your brain has realised they do not matter.
Sometimes you even recognise the mistake they are making while flaming you, give them a politely informative response, and they realise their mistake and start being civilised. Not very often, but sometimes. 😄
It's an anxiety thing; the actual name is "rejection sensitivity dysphoria": https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24099-rejection-sensitive-dysphoria-rsd
A lot of AuDHD people suffer it. Great example, I started a business and I've gotten 99% positive feedback on the product from dozens of people, but a handful of negative comments and two of my best friends didn't like it, and I've actually considered giving up entirely because of that.
Which is insane. I love my product, I'm very happy with it... but my buddies not liking it makes me very sad on a whole bunch of levels.
Also I did delete my old account and comments, precisely because as MagicShel said above: it had existed long enough to be a liability. It's not as big a deal here as on Reddit though, you can export your preferences and get back to the same subscriptions and blocks very easily on any new account!
I'll also say that for people who experience that intentionally building up distress tolerance is super valuable
I have this trait irl. It's good to know about it and even better to try to regulate it, because it makes life seem so much worse than it really is. I can see there are people who don't have it this way and who just forget all the bad stuff almost immediately - must be nice.
I'm just asking out of curiosity: why do you think you care so much about the negative comments?
I am one of those people that shrug it off, and if I were to try to rationalize my emotional armor, I'd say that the places these matters of taste and disagreement come from, like psychologically, are often not you're own fault and wouldn't really be fixable even if you tried.
But, I wonder if that might be missing the mark. The futility of trying to appease people who are unappeasable might actually have nothing to do with it.
Not just comments, negative things in general. I think in my case it's connected to a hereditary predisposition to depression and anxiety. The bad stuff makes a large impact and the good stuf just doesn't seem to produce any neural pathways. It's physiological. Some of my family got much better with modern antidepresants. I went a different way and I'm ok now as well, it took decades though.
That's the universal human experience. Listen to every marginally famous person and they will tell you that a single negative comment feels like it weighs more than 100 positive ones. Then factor in that people who disagree feel compelled to voice their opinion while those who agree often silently nod to themselves and move on. So the 100 positive comments are likely representative of 500 people who agree but don't say anything.
So far, you seem to be doing well. Don't let a couple of the haters get to you.
Of course, if a pattern appears of many comments criticizing the same thing, then you can think about if there's something you should change about your behavior. But even then, the change should come from your own realization that you want to change something, not from a desire to appeal to the faceless mass of terminally online weirdos.
Yep. That is true for most people.
My guess: survival instinct. It's the haters that will stab you when you're not paying attention. Unless you're famous being hated on the Internet is safe. But our brains are made for surviving in the wild, not the Internet.