So, about a week ago, I wrote a piece that I feel has a solid point and I posted it on Hacker News. It hit 39 karma and had 54 comments. Not impressive for Hacker News overall, but, hey, decent for my own personal blog's track record.

The top voted comment on it is incredibly dismissive, completely dismissing my 6-ish years of college, more than 5 years working in insurance, etc. over one detail that wasn't thoroughly researched and was, in fact, framed to admit that it was kind of hand-wavy. I don't think what I said was entirely wrong and stupid, but it wasn't 100% accurate.

(HN item in question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10819091)

But I think I have two choices here:

I can be completely bummed that one person chose to completely dismiss everything based on one not perfect remark in the piece and others upvoted that. Or I can value the upvotes the item got, the amount of meaningful discussion it did generate, the page views it got, and the constructive feedback that tells me that if I want to write more on this topic, I need to do a bit more research and firm up my ability to defend my points or random asshats are going to say "Well, based on one single detail, nothing she says can possibly have any merit."

But, hey, I have done similar things myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10828054 So, maybe people doing that isn't all asshattery. Maybe it is more complicated than that and when someone tells you "x detail makes me not read/believe/whatever any of it", then that is constructive feedback that you can choose to try to learn something from so you can improve your writing -- or not, as you see fit.

I have spent a lot of years trying to figure out how to express myself effectively online. I think part of the challenge is that a) your audience is incredibly diverse, so lazy writing habits that are rife with unquestioned assumptions which may be racist, sexist, etc are going to get called out online even though your personal circle of friends wouldn't have a problem with it (because they are also kind of racist, sexist, whatever) and b) you are talking to people who may know more than you about some piece of it and/or can google up info, either to fact check or just to rebut because they don't like you, don't agree with your point, just got dumped, are IUI (Internetting Under The Influence) or for any damn reason.

So, in addition to readers perhaps needing to try to "find the insight, not the error," authors can also try to focus more on the metrics that make them feel positive about having written it rather than focusing on the comments that make them cringe.

It took some self control at first, but I am finding that my experience of the Internet is much better now that I focus more on counting the positives and, as much as possible, ignoring the negatives. It does involve some judgment calls. You can't just turn the other cheek on everything. There are situations where you need to correct people or clarify your meaning or defend your statement. But if you are getting traffic and getting comments, even if some of them are ugly, then you accomplished something.

I am trying harder to decide what I want to accomplish, keeping my eye on evidence that I am moving that goal forward, and not expecting some "perfect" experience (for lack of a better way of saying that, as I have other things to do and this comment has gone on long enough).