Do you guys ever get worked up with some of the questions people ask, like the trolls who are just upset?
TL;DRThe developers say trolls don't really get to them, they've learned not to take harsh feedback personally and look for the valid points, though trolls make it harder to pick out serious concerns.
Not really. I was thinking about this recently. The first time you kind of encounter the experience of trolling, it's like, oh my god, why are you thinking of me so much, what's wrong? Sometimes when I'm stressed at work, I read the Reddit cats forum, and I clicked on new instead of top recently, and I noticed there are people who dedicate their lives to trolling the people who post pictures of their cats. There's like a guy who every day posts a picture of a cat with poop photoshopped onto it with the comment, 'I pooped on this cat.' That's this man's entire life. It's not us. It's not the people who have a problem with us. We're just jerks.
I think it took a lot of getting used to, working here, because you do have a lot of people and you have to find a way to not take it personally, because people can be vicious.
It's a learning lesson. Especially different parts. When I was still doing art, people would just trash your art, and people could do it in a nice way, or they could do it in a mean way, and half the time you're just in the corner crying in a little fetal position. But you're like, I'm not taking it seriously, I'm not doing this. And then other times, design the same way, just poking holes in designs. Some of my favorite times working with some of the lead designers was you give them a design, and then the whole entire paper is just one big red mark. But it's really good feedback, and that's the thing. Some of the forum, even the trolls, they still have points. So you just have to push past the trolliness and just look at the points. Okay, this is the point they're making. And then once you start collating all that feedback, it's no longer about troll this person or troll this, whatever. It's just like, okay, these are the points they're trying to make. It's just looking past that.
In fact, I think the one really negative thing about people who are dedicated trolls is it makes it a little bit harder to say, here's the serious concern. Because there are lots of people with actual concerns, and sometimes they are passionate to the extent that they seem like trolls. They're not. We know they're not. But it's just kind of filtering that is, I think, the most difficult thing about it.