[politelemon]

Only true if you're expecting the author to behave like a robot and exist without any kind of emotion. I certainly don't see how you would call that constructive in any way.

Loose analogy, I don't watch videos of retail workers being abused and think, that customer is providing constructive feedback.

[vultour]

Maybe we just use a different definition of "constructive feedback", but my emotional perception of a comment has nothing to do with the classification.

"You suck and your software is a piece of crap" is not constructive feedback because there's no details to act on.

"Fuck you the submit button is obscured by the footer" is constructive even if the message has a personal attack.

You might choose not to act on comments due to emotions, but I don't think it invalidates any constructive feedback contained within.

[hatenberg]

And this right here is why a large number of engineers never make it pas mid-level. Thinking that the only things that matter are technical and the social aspects of communication are just unnecessary complications

[scraptor]

Understanding the things people are actually telling you without getting distracted by anger is also part of communications. You don't have to engage with the rude users but their problems are just as real.

[SpEd3Y]

Only true if you're expecting the the person who provided feedback to behave like a robot and exist without any kind of emotions.

Loose analogy, I don't watch videos with people buying a bike with no breaks, fall and get hurt, then go to the vendor and calmly explain to them that they should modify their bike design so the breaks function and think, that customer is behaving like a human being.

See what I did there? :) My analogy might not be great, I give you that. But frustration is a normal human behavior. Granted I strongly believe you should try to vent a different way and then give clam feedback, you can't discard feedback just because the person giving it is frustrated.

We should be able to distinguish between frustrated good feedback and just abuse. I know I was able to get feedback from very hostile messages. And last time I checked I'm not a robot. So it's as skill you can gain.

[samus]

Open source developers should disregard hostile feedback out of principle, for their own sanity. The feedback might be valuable, but it's ultimately not worth mining for because they get very little for their work, donations at best. Commercial customer support stuff at least get a regular income for their trouble.

[SpEd3Y]

Yeah, frustration breeds frustration. So I agree that it's better to disregard it if you can't handle it.

But I'm just wondering, is it possible to ignore the form of the message and listen to the content? Looking back the stoics were very good at controlling their own emotions and dealing with insults. Insults would just not get to them, they would bounce right off them. Is this a skill we've lost as a society?

It seems that nowadays we're focusing external, not internal. Instead of developing a thick skin we're focusing on changing the behavior of the people who's insulting us. To me that seems like a pointless endeavor. You can't change someone else behavior if they don't want to cooperate. And without a thick skin, all it takes is one jerk to ruin your day. With thick skin the insults from a jerk bounces off you and your day is still a good day. So, it seems to me that we should focus inwards instead of outwards. Not saying it's easy. Just saying humans were capable of that in the past, nowadays I don't hear anybody talking about it.