The Psychology of Haters

You finally post the thing, the video or the launch or the photo you sat on for a week, and by the end of the day the comments are in. They come from people who have never met you and spent maybe four seconds with your work, and somehow they already have opinions on your face, your motives, whether you’re any good, and whether you should have posted at all.

Your instinct is to read every one and find the part you’re supposed to fix. Skip it. Almost none of it is about you, and once you see what it’s actually about, it gets a lot easier to scroll past.

Worth saying up front: not every harsh comment is hate. Real criticism points at the work and wants it to be better, and the difference is easy to feel. A note about your pacing, your pricing, or a typo on the third slide is worth a read. “Who do you think you are” is not.

Hate shows up when you’re visible

Hate doesn’t arrive when you fail. It arrives when you do well. You go viral, you launch, you put your face on camera, and someone who was scrolling past now has to sit with where their own life is next to yours. A lot of people don’t like that comparison, and the quickest way to get rid of the feeling is to take a shot at whoever caused it. You didn’t do anything to earn it except be visible enough to be seen.

The insult is a confession

Most of it is projection. The person typing has a feeling they’d rather not look at, usually envy or the sense that they’re falling behind, and it’s easier to throw it at a stranger than to sit with it. So they throw it, with your name in the comment.

Look at what they choose to attack. A hateful comment is always specific, and the thing a person reaches for, your face, your voice, your money, is usually whatever they’re most insecure about in themselves. “You only got this because of how you look” tends to come from someone who feels unseen. “So fake” tends to come from someone who knows they’re performing. The insult points at what’s loud in their head and almost nothing about you.

Some of it runs on a plain sense of unfairness. A person looks at what you’re building and feels, underneath, that you shouldn’t be allowed to have it, either because they think they deserve it more than you do or because they can’t picture having it themselves, so it galls them that you can. That hardens into “who does she think she is,” and it lands in your comments.

It tends to sting most coming from people in your own field, the ones close enough to measure themselves against you. The people who actually know you pull at you in a quieter way, which is crabs in a bucket. This is the strangers.

The women who kept going

The ones who got the worst of it are not the ones who disappeared.

Taylor Swift was the most-hated woman on the internet in 2016. #TaylorSwiftIsOverParty went worldwide, she went quiet for a year, then came back and ran the highest-grossing tour in history.

Selena Gomez spent years getting body-shamed and mocked over her lupus, and in those same years built Rare Beauty into a brand worth billions.

Lizzo gets a fresh round of it every time she posts, four Grammys and a Glastonbury headline notwithstanding.

Jackie Aina took years of racist hate from inside the beauty industry, kept going, and walked away with her own brand and more authority than any of the people who threw it.

Not one of them won by responding. They kept working until the noise stopped meaning anything.

How to respond

The right response is nothing.

Not a clever clapback, not a dignified reply, not a vague subtweet. Nothing. The comment is bait for a reaction, because a reaction turns it into a back-and-forth, and the back-and-forth is what they showed up for. Don’t reply. Don’t screenshot it to vent, which only gives it the audience it wanted. If the first comment in a thread is ugly, don’t read the second one, because the thread does not improve.

When one lands, run it through three steps:

1. Read it through their lens, not as an attack. The comment is information about where they are. If it stings for a second first, fine, that passes.
2. Drop it. It’s about them, not you. No reply.
3. Get it out of sight. Block the account, mute the word, close the tab. You wouldn’t let someone who talks to you like that into your house, and your page is your house.

You can’t out-nice your way past it

Once enough people see your work, some of them hating it is just arithmetic. A big enough audience always holds people who were never going to like you, and no amount of being softer or more careful shrinks that number to zero.

The first wave feels personal. The tenth feels like weather. At some point you stop bracing for the comments and barely notice them, and you go on working with them still rolling in, unbothered, because by then you know they were never about you.

Sources

• Nigel Barber, “The Psychology of Insults,” Psychology Today, 2016. Why people insult, and what the choice of insult reveals about the speaker.
• Psychology Today, “Projection”. Projection as a defense mechanism.