I got a ton of hate because some people forget that we are human!

I received quite a bit of criticism for misstating the Laowa 200mm price. In my earlier post (now corrected) I wrote that the lens would cost $999, while the actual price is $1999. How did this mix-up happen?

Here’s the story: this morning I went on a long hike, leaving around 5am. My kids were still asleep, and I quickly checked the Laowa pricing news on the Newsshooter YouTube channel. Since I didn’t want to wake them, I watched the video muted and relied only on the subtitles.

The captions showed “17.99” and “9.99,”…this did confuse me:

So I did run the YouTube video through ChatGPT:

And ChatGpt told me the price is $999. All this unusual work I did to not wake up my kids and still be able to give you the news on a Sunday morning at 5am (I did schedule the post for later while I was offline hiking)

What happened?

I came back from the hike and saw the comments with a ton of insults. One wrote:

Admin suffers from lack of total lack of empathy for his audience

And so on and so forth.

Here’s my take:

• I truly envy those haters for never making mistakes — you must be absolute gods at what you do!
• What I don’t envy is the lack of respect you show towards others. Criticism is fine, but insults are not.

Let’s be real: I post 4–5 times a day for the full year, and the moment there’s something you dislike or even mistake, the negativity pours in. It feels like some of you are just here to bully, not to contribute — and likely behave the same way on other platforms.

From now on, anything lacking basic human respect will be banned. I want both my private life and my work to be surrounded by respect, positivity, and maybe even a bit of laughter. If that’s not what you’re here for, then please feel free to take your pride and cleverness to another website.

On a serious note:

I apologize to the Laowa team for the mistake, I apologize the readers for having made this error. Will try to not repeat the same mistake! ;)