Is Hate Adulthood’s Type of Bullying?
If you are growing your exposure, brace yourself for having to deal with criticism.
I am a relatively new writer to Medium. I never had much exposure outside of my inner circle of friends, family, and coworkers. Actually, I started writing to change that trend a little bit. To share my way of thinking and some experience regarding software development and technology in general.
What Happened?
I’ve written some articles where I’ve covered topics from dealing with failure to remote work. Some have generated more attraction than others, but all of them went about 300–1k views.
Last week, I published an article where I shared my thoughts on Scrum, and how switching to Kanban solved a lot of the problems we had. I end up concluding that in an industry that is continuously growing to a Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment, Scrum will tend to be replaced by Kanban. You can find the whole article here:
The story had an outstanding amount of views, for my standards, reaching over 1.5K views in the first two days, and a fair amount of claps. I was happy about it!
Then, things went crazy!
On the sixth day (not sure how), the number of views exploded. I had over 4.5K views in just one day. I was astonished. This led me to refresh the stats page every fifteen minutes or so. People were reading, clapping, responding, and sharing.
Am I going viral?
I started to wonder what consequences this could bring to me. Both positive and negative. But the reactions were mostly good. I had some people that had a different way of thinking, but they kindly exposed their positions, and I was happy to discuss the topic and get to know their experiences. Most of them were a healthy exchange of experiences, one of the things I value the most here on Medium.
Getting Criticism
After a while (probably a couple of hours), I get a notification of a private note. Someone commented that “he didn’t agree with my article as it spread many false misconceptions, that my arguments were not valid, and that I should read the scrum guide.” He proceeded to say that he had written a response article to counter-attack mine, which would be published in Better Programming as well.
Believe me when I say that I tried for that comment not to affect me, but it surely did. I started thinking, “what have I done? What will people think when they read his piece? Maybe I should never have written this in the first place.”
I never had to deal with hate (even if this is not actually hate, but it sure felt like it) due to my lack of exposure, so this was very hard to swallow.
I consider myself to be a very rational person, and as such, I know that many people liked my post and identify themselves in the story that I posted. I also know that it’s impossible to please both Greeks and Trojans. There will always be people that dislike your work. Nevertheless, I felt terrible because of that single response I had.
I hate emotions. Even after having over 1K claps, dozens of shares, and a lot of positive responses, a single critic was able to put me down. It’s nonsense!
I started to relate this feeling with the feeling of a kid that is bullied in school. Despite having dozens of people that like him, he pays too much attention to the ones that are turning his life into a living hell.
How could this be avoided?
This could very well be avoided if instead of a private note and whole new article of response, I had a response where he exposed his point of view, and we could learn with each other. Take that in mind when responding to someone. Always have an open mind since you may not have the same experiences as the other party.
My advice for any new writer or anyone that is growing their exposure: be ready to deal with criticism. It will happen. The question is when, and what you do with it. You can filter them, and check if it brings something that you can improve, or if you should just ignore it, and go on with your life. Sometimes letting go is the best you can do.
Me? I’m still figuring out how to manage my emotions about it.