Be Positive or Keep Silent – Standard Social Media Etiquette Rule

Have you ever wondered about why you rarely actually hear anything very negative for you personally online instead being exposed to all the great comments and encouragements - whatever the idea you ask for opinion on is? I myself have seen examples of this particular trend everywhere online and since the vast majority of comments everywhere are positive, I have to think that people simply prefer to keep their negative thoughts to themselves. And no, sorry but I don’t believe there are no people who have such negative thoughts.

The recent example is YouTube with their revelation about the ratings of videos on the widely popular video sharing website. The thing is that their stats demonstrates that 5-star rating dominates everything else that is available so in the vast majority of situations people will select 5 stars to rate a video - and only very rarely a worse rating will be used.

In fact, when people are anonymous, they may also decide to voice their opinions out when they absolutely hate something - hence the fact that some 1-star ratings also exist in YouTube. This is an indication of the fact that only strong emotions prompt any kind of action - be it demonstration of love or hate. But no matter how strong emotions are, if a person tells his or her name to share some thoughts, the thoughts will almost always be positive.

In fact, I think it is visible everywhere online. For example, when a new startup is launched, all the bloggers prefer to be positive in their coverage - or they simply choose not to publish their thoughts at all. And only in the very last paragraph we are entitled to make some negative remark and mention some of the disadvantages of the startup - trying to be objective and not too positive to sound like startups pay us for coverage.

The same is true for comments on such positive blog posts: people will encourage startup owners to continue their excellent work and offer them further updates of the exciting new product launched - even if only a small percentage of such commentators will actually use the product, let alone wait for the updates to really try them out to see if the product is actually getting better.

I am no psychology or demography expert but I have a feeling that it is also part of American mentality: you simply should not expect people to tell you anything negative looking you in the eye. Really, what is your answer to the usual “How are you?”? I bet it will be “I’m fine”, right?

But it is not like this everywhere in the world: while in the US people will rarely tell anything negative to each other, here in Russia it is totally fine to tell what you really think (even if you don’t think anything good at all), especially when you talk to some good friends. I guess it is the fact that we value honesty and frankness over politeness and this is the reason of this fact - so you should never be surprised about seeing tons of negative comments on the Russian blogs (if you can read Russian, of course).

I would not judge here if it is better to be polite and positive or to be honest because this is something every single person should make a decision on. But in some business issues I really value honesty much higher - after all, what’s the point in expert advice if it is polite rather than honest?

I have seen such situations myself a lot: whenever I am asked to consult a startup, I invariably try to write a very honest review of exactly what I think about the product and its strategy. And since startups that are good and successful rarely ask for any consulting help, my reviews are frequently negative as I try to point out the disadvantages and the measures that should be taken to improve the situation.

But when I return such negative reviews, I always have to explain that they should try not to be offended but should instead understand that my review is based on the idea that it should be unbiased and objective to be helpful. And very often the entrepreneurs that get such reviews from me mention that in the past they also paid for some consulting but it was not useful - because the reviews were very polite and consulters did not dare to criticize their customers and their products.

But this is something I definitely fail to understand. If I want to hear some good things and get some reassurance, I will go to my husband or my best friend or my mother and ask them for some mental support - and I will get it (for free, by the way). But if I want some expert advice, is it fair to get this mental support instead of objective advice that I was actually looking for? Is it fair to make people pay for compliments?

So I don’t know about you, but if you ask me, I’d prefer people to actually be fair online instead of being polite all the time because their honest opinions will always be much more useful. But should I really hope to see something like “This is such a bad blog post” in the comments?