The Silent Art of Comment Mastery
5 Steps That Turn Critics Into Allies
Hi Friends 👋
This is a short and practical guide for people who dare to share something online and risk their views being challenged.
When I put it that way, it almost sounds like sharing stuff is a good idea, right? Instant feedback about your thoughts, business ideas, and offers.
Incredible.
Instead of sitting in a room and perfecting an idea that might never work, you can just put it out there and find out.
But be ready because if it works, you’ll attract more people and, eventually, feedback that you might find challenging to process.
This happened the last time I talked about CI/CD on LinkedIn, where, admittedly, I was wrong, and my post wasn’t talking about CI but about building pipelines. People pointed this out in a more or less constructive way. If you’re curious about where I learned from hundreds of comments, read my previous article.
However, something that was my go-to online interaction standard surprised some people, and I started receiving comments about how well I handled comments - which inspired this article.
So, here’s how I approach comments:
These five steps have saved me from countless online headaches. They might do the same for you:
👶 Adopt a beginner’s mindset
As we work on more complex systems and tasks over the years, we accumulate experience, and our sense of being a seasoned professional slowly takes shape.
I found that this thinking sabotages us when we’re about to discover:
something new or
that we were wrong in a previous assumption
The senior mindset wants us to hold on to our comfortable old ideas and principles. They kept you employed, let you charge more, and put food on the table, right?
Not necessarily.
When you got into programming, whatever you did was mostly wrong. However, you made it so far by remaining open to feedback and hungry for more learning. You had (and should still have) a beginner’s mindset.
So next time you’re about to jump into the comment section, say out loud: I could be wrong, so let’s see what folks are saying.
💁♂️ Assume best intentions
After creating content for years, one huge realization was that nobody’s out there to watch everything you write, and when you suddenly make a mistake, they jump out of the shadows with: “Ha! I’ve got you!”.
If someone takes the time to write a comment, they want you and everyone else reading the comments to learn their perspective, so it’s not only for you.
Of course, sometimes we take those personally, but here’s the catch.
⛩️ Account for tone lost in writing
Facial expressions, eye contact, and gesticulation can help you get by when you make a joke no one laughs at.
You don’t get this luxury in writing.
Sure, you can play around with emojis, but it’s easy to mistake good advice for insulting when you don’t see the person talking to you.
This is why you should always account for some tone lost in writing.
For many people, including me, English isn’t even our first language, which can create additional language barriers.
⛈️ Consider the commenter’s context
It’s your choice how you react to events.
Framing helps a lot with this. Imagine you’re in traffic and meet a reckless driver.
For a long time, I couldn’t leave what I had seen without a comment. But this helped nobody. The driver kept rushing, and I was sitting in my car listening to myself swearing and explaining how such a terrible driver they are.
But they could have been late for work for the second time and were afraid of losing their jobs. This doesn’t justify reckless driving, but if you can make it on time, you will keep feeding the family.
Nobody leaves mean comments online to feed their families, but you can frame it as a result of what’s happening in their heads. It can be:
anxiety
fear of losing their job
incompetence in the ever-changing, LLM-augmented world
the lack of investment in communication skills
🧑🎓 Find learning opportunities
Now that you’ve framed the comment section correctly and know that:
You could be wrong
but people aren’t there to get you
they comment in a rush (sometimes even without reading, strange)
and they might be doing this after their worst day at work
The final and most important thing of dealing with comments online can finally come: learning from the comments.
People give you advice, constructive criticism, and requests if you understand the comments and sometimes read between the lines. Here are a couple of examples.
Revise Your Writing
Someone seems off-topic in their comment. Instead of saying, “That’s not what I’m talking about,” see if you were straightforward in your writing. You might have implied something unwillingly. It’s time to revise your writing and make it clearer next time.
Discover New Topics
If someone is asking for a different thing, that’s great. You just accidentally researched what people want (most struggle with this). Thank them and incorporate that into your next post, newsletter, or whatever you write. This is how I wrote Stop Pretending You Do Continuous Integration – Here’s What It Really Means.
Build Authority
People ask you seemingly irrelevant questions - your chance to get some authority on the subject. Answer every question you get as best as possible and use those answers to fuel more research and writing. People realized I react well to mean comments, so I wrote this guide for you, see?
Conclusion
Step 1: Adopt a beginner’s mindset
Step 2: Assume best intentions
Step 3: Account for tone lost in writing
Step 4: Consider the commenter’s context
Step 5: Find learning opportunities
Bonus Step: Don’t feed the trolls.
Sometimes, you’ll meet genuine trolls online. Their goal? To provoke you. Your best move? Don’t engage. Save your energy for conversations that matter.
Try applying these steps in your next online interaction, and let me know how it goes!
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Approaching each comment for the sake of learning something new and looking for the "good" thing in each comment is my go-to approach as well.
As you said, negativity is out there, so I try to be careful with wasting my energy on negativity. And, my first move will always be a positive one.
Thank you for the mention, Akos!
Great perspective Akos.
I'm all for paying attention to constructive and genuine comments that create some sort of discussion. Of course, it's really important not to let the trolls get to you. Also, I try to ignore comments where the commenter is trying to write a condescending comment to prove their point.
Also, thanks for the mention!