My advice is to accept that ‘haters are gonna hate’ and just take the hit. Make your arguments as clear and your advice as easy to follow as possible. But understand that no matter what you do, if you tell people to buy bitcoin at $230, the top comment might be critical. Some people will listen and benefit.
I’ve just been thinking about this with respect to two posts I recently authored. First I wrote “Forcing yourself to keep your identity small is self-harm” and this got a bunch of negative response (e.g. currently a score of 17 with 24 votes; my guess based on watching things come in is that it’s close to 50% downvotes). In response I wrote “Forcing Yourself is Self Harm, or Don’t Goodhart Yourself” and so far it’s doing “better” by some measures (score of 25 right now, but with only 11 votes, all positive as best I can tell).
The thing is both posts say exactly the same thing other than that the first post is vary concretely about a particular case while the latter is a general article that covers the original article as a special case. I basically wrote the second version by taking the original text and modifying it to be explicitly generalized rather than just about one case.
Now if I ask myself which one I think is better, I actually think it’s the first one even though the latter is better received in terms of karma. The second one lacks teeth and I think it’s too easy to read it and not really get what it’s saying in a concrete way. The reader might nod along saying “ah, yes, sage advice, I will follow it” and then promptly fail to integrate it into even a single place where it matters, whereas the former is very in your face about a single place where it matters and confronts the reader to consider that they may have been screwing up at doing a thing they value.
I like this kind of stuff that confronts readers because, although it may draw greater controversy, it also seems more likely to land for the person who will benefit from reading it, and managing criticism/downvotes only matters insofar as I draw too much negative attention and negatively impact the visibility of the post to people who would have benefitted from having seen it in a world where it was less criticized and less downvoted.
Of course in this isolated case of two articles there are confounding factors. For example, maybe people “came around” on my arguments by the time the second post came out since they saw the first one, or maybe more people just ignored the second post since it looked so much like the first one. But I’ve noticed this sort of trend over and over in my own writing and the writing of others: saying something direct that challenges the reader will draw the ire of readers who dislike having been challenged on something they hold dear, and saying the same thing in a less direct way that avoids triggering their displeasure also is actually worse because it less well lands for anyone and the people who were going to criticise it now don’t but without that meaning anything.
I’ve just been thinking about this with respect to two posts I recently authored. First I wrote “Forcing yourself to keep your identity small is self-harm” and this got a bunch of negative response (e.g. currently a score of 17 with 24 votes; my guess based on watching things come in is that it’s close to 50% downvotes). In response I wrote “Forcing Yourself is Self Harm, or Don’t Goodhart Yourself” and so far it’s doing “better” by some measures (score of 25 right now, but with only 11 votes, all positive as best I can tell).
The thing is both posts say exactly the same thing other than that the first post is vary concretely about a particular case while the latter is a general article that covers the original article as a special case. I basically wrote the second version by taking the original text and modifying it to be explicitly generalized rather than just about one case.
Now if I ask myself which one I think is better, I actually think it’s the first one even though the latter is better received in terms of karma. The second one lacks teeth and I think it’s too easy to read it and not really get what it’s saying in a concrete way. The reader might nod along saying “ah, yes, sage advice, I will follow it” and then promptly fail to integrate it into even a single place where it matters, whereas the former is very in your face about a single place where it matters and confronts the reader to consider that they may have been screwing up at doing a thing they value.
I like this kind of stuff that confronts readers because, although it may draw greater controversy, it also seems more likely to land for the person who will benefit from reading it, and managing criticism/downvotes only matters insofar as I draw too much negative attention and negatively impact the visibility of the post to people who would have benefitted from having seen it in a world where it was less criticized and less downvoted.
Of course in this isolated case of two articles there are confounding factors. For example, maybe people “came around” on my arguments by the time the second post came out since they saw the first one, or maybe more people just ignored the second post since it looked so much like the first one. But I’ve noticed this sort of trend over and over in my own writing and the writing of others: saying something direct that challenges the reader will draw the ire of readers who dislike having been challenged on something they hold dear, and saying the same thing in a less direct way that avoids triggering their displeasure also is actually worse because it less well lands for anyone and the people who were going to criticise it now don’t but without that meaning anything.
Karma, the amount of people reached by a post and the impact it has on people correlate with each other but neither determines the others.