your initial response had been the only response, non-AveDesk zealots would clearly seen what a crusade the AveDesk editors/developers were on. The continual responses you provided, however, simply added fuel to fire and engendered much of that sentiment to Stardock as well as AveDesk
I agree with that. However, in what way are my subsequent responses deserving of "hate"? I responded a brief polite comment that complemented the review but pointed out that asserting that Avedesk was the most significant product of 2004 was a bit of a push and in response I got a bunch of nasty, profanity-ridden flames.
I've written about this issue over the years and you can almost put it in mathematical terms:
Every person who writes something has (for lack of a better term) an annoyance factor. That is, what the odds are that what they write will annoy someone.
For example, if a person's annoyance factor is 100% then every person who reads what they write will be annoyed by them.
More realistically, let's say someone's annoyance factor is 0.1%. That means every time that person posts, 1 out of every 1000 peopel who is exposed to that post will be annoyed.
In short, the more someone posts, the more people they will eventually annoy. Even if you can manage to come across as the nicest guy in the world, you will eventually annoy people because no one has an annoyance factor of 0.
There is also the other side of the equation -- how many annoyance points it takes before someone become a detractor. Some people, like Andy Hutchinson, have a very very low annoyance threshold before they become detractors. My mere presence on forums talking about our software, even when on topic (it's not like I hang out in other people's areas spamming them to go buy our stuff for instance).
The question is, should people (like me) be driven from expressing themselves because of a small group of intolerant people? Can someone like Andy Hutchinson really point out something I did that really deserved the abuse that he and others have heaped on me? The AquaXP thread that was linked is a great example. I make a brief comment and I get profanity and flames tossed my direction. I'm still not sure what I did that ticked Andy H off so much that he went from website to website trashing me and Stardock as if we were the anti-christ and then carrying it on to his columns in a magazine.
But at the end of the day, how much business value do detractors have? If a product or service is good and people know that the company that provides it is honest, hard working, and reasonable then hopefully there will always be people to set the record straight.
