All You’re Ever Gonna Be Is Mean

Mean comments are the worst. Closely related: people who give 1-star reviews or negative feedback because THEY thought they were buying a different item with a similar title and/or didn’t read the description before they bought an item or booked a service. Slinging a string of harsh words at content offered for free seems even more uselessly cruel: Do you want your unpaid money back? Would you like to speak to a non-existent manager? And once someone has been emboldened to be unkind, others soon follow, leading to a nitpicky horde wasting their only precious life and mental energy on … nothing much, really.

My favorite saying is from Wil Wheaton, from this post: http://wilwheaton.net/2013/05/they-make-comments/.

“Just remember, when someone is being a terrible monstrous awful cruel human being: you made a thing, and they made a comment.”

It takes time, creativity, patience, and (hopefully) talent to write a blog, make videos, write books, and create marketing materials. It takes NONE of those things to make a mean comment. In fact, the person probably forgot all about you after they wrote the comment, because they headed off somewhere else to make more mean comments, never acknowledging whatever is really wrong inside them that motivates them to try to ruin a stranger’s day. I’d rather be the person who made the thing, even if it gets a thousand mean comments, than live for one minute in the unhappy shoes of the person who only makes comments.

Many Web 1.0 sites and all of their comments, from the hilarious to the enraged to the spammy, have vanished entirely already. Web 2.0 will surely follow. All that energy will have been wasted.

Note: I began writing this post on August 1, 2017, saved a draft, and forgot about it until 2025. It seems worthwhile to share it now, as the internet and the real world have filled up with unhappy, uncurious, and un-Christian bullies who want to inflict suffering on others.