“Hater”, sounds like a term that only Talor Swift or other superstars use. In fact, that’s what I thought too.
A few months ago, one of my blog articles went viral in a Taiwanese Facebook group. It’s about the steps I took to immigrate to Australia in the past 10years. Soon after some encouraging comments, I saw one person wrote “how is immigration even a life goal?”. I thought that’s all, but in another group that I shared the same article, another person wrote “don’t listen to her, nursing is the only way you can immigrate to Australia now, even someone as rich as her took 10 years. And by the way, don’t you dear to show everyone how much money you spent on all these?”
Those comments hurt, but at least after my explanations, they understood what I was trying to say in the article and stopped those comments.
However, the worst has yet to come.
A few weeks later, I wrote another article about Sydney lockdown, with some supermarket photos taken from friends. But one of them I forgot to ask the owner’s permission. And that’s when the real public relations crisis started.
That friend first commented under my article asking if I used his photo. I immediately apologised and took the photo down, but he then replied saying it’s okay to use, so I put it back.
The day after, he replied again saying that he doesn’t want me to use that photo, so I took it down again.
BUT, comments started to flow around.
Someone commented, “how you could even forget about asking one’s permission but remember to put watermarks on all photos?”
Hello, don’t you know there are apps that help you put on watermark on all photos with one click?
Then another person wrote — “ she just wants to be famous, last time she was showing off how she immigrated to Australia, but how is this even something to be proud of? It took her 10 years!”
Hello, why can’t I be proud of this? And what is that even do with Sydney lockdown?
Then more people started to comment — “who is she?”, “How dare you” etc.
Those comments hurt me so hard that I kept thinking about them for the next few days.
The good thing is, at least the photos were taken down, and comments stopped after a few days.
AND, that’s not the worst yet.
There’s a Chinese platform that I published my videos onto, it’s called Bilibili. Usually, the videos are fine, but after I uploaded a video about how I immigrated to Australia. I started to see a lot of comments. And those comments are as bad as you can imagine.
It started with something soft “if you posted this a few years ago, maybe people will watch it, but now is not a good time”. Then it turned into something like this “why do you even want to immigrate to a country full of convicts?”, “I just disliked this video”. Then, they started to attack me, “shame on you”, “why you even publish a video here, fuck off Taiwanese”.
WOW
I was shocked by those comments, and couldn’t sleep well for a few days. Until I saw a YouTuber sharing his thought on haters.
When you see the first hater under your video, open a bottle of champaign. You should really celebrate this, because it’s when your video goes outside of your comfort zone, it’s when your video started to attract people that are not your friends or supporters.
Yes, that’s right! He then said
The world is so big, you can’t expect everyone to like you. The most important thing is how to continue to engage with people who support you, and produce content for them. Those people are who you should care about, not haters.
That really changed my mindset on how I look at haters. From then on, even though I still get negative comments from time to time, I don’t care that much anymore.
As long as I continue to do the right thing, produce meaningful content, haters are just the 0 and 1 on the screen.
So, I hope this article gives you some ideas about what are the public relations problems a journalist/Youtuber may face, and how to overcome them.
And a fun fact I learnt from this — to get haters, you don’t even need 1M sub, 1k followers will do.
