So we had our first hater... but first please listen to one of our music we think we was bashing against. After that, let's hear the context.

Context

Our development blogs on gamedev mainly focus on the actual development of our game(s) and any related research that we've done. So, our target audience is other video game developers. We also have our own subreddit where our target audience is everyone. Thus, we decided to make our subreddit public and allow subscribers to post content that follows the rules, which they are mainly about posting relevant content. 

Recently, we've been gaining more popularity and finally gained our 25th subscriber! ? However, with popularity means more human attention. One thing I know about humans is that there are among them douchebag, troll, egoist, evil [and so forth] people. Inevitably, we were bound to attract the attention of one of those toxic people and so we had our first experience with what we call a hater.

The Hater

The hater firstly unannouncedly posted this on our subreddit :

The person actually posted music of his game [I suppose]. It is an electronic music video. While it's true that we post vaporwave music videos on our subreddit, they follow the rule that it's about our game and our company.

So I decided to remove his post and send him a warning as a message :

Now, I don't clearly understand exactly what he meant by "Someone better than you, and wanted to make you feel better" but I do understand that this guy is saying he's better than us and that him posting his content on our subreddit would make us feel better (lol). I suppose the "better than us" part is related to our music, which is meant to be that way to fit into the game design of the game. Anyway, as you can see, this guy is so cool because he breaks rules. Wow.

But wait, there's more!

Just before I banned him, he posted this on our subreddit : 

Of course we banned you for posting content about your game on our subreddit to gain popularity. Our subreddit specifies precisely through rules that it is meant to be a platform of communication for our company and a way to keep our subscribers in touch with the development of our games. Just look at r/fallout for example. Their first rule says that all posts must be directly related to Fallout. Are they not cool to ban people who disrespect that rule? No, it does not make sense. Reddit is a magnificent social network that allows specific sub-forums as ours and it's actually what defines it.

Anyway, I decided to ban him and then ignore him. I've always been more of an observer than someone who needs to express his opinion loudly and publicly on social networks but because this is the first time we had a hater for our game, I just needed to post about this.

What we learned from this :

• Added a rule about not spamming that allows us to give warnings and ban people from our subreddit.
• Ignore banned people.
• Made our subreddit restricted instead of public. Now, only approved redditors are able to post on our subreddit.
• Toxic people take time from us video game developers that we could put into making our game(s)