How to respond to criticism

If you put a creative work out into the world and someone has a very negative reaction to it, I find that often the best thing to say is: Thanks for the feedback, sorry it wasn't for you. Now if they made some factually untrue statement, you should push back on it,1 and if they're using the critique as cover to make personal attacks, feel free to tell them to fuck off. But if they're giving you a good-faith negative assessment of your work? It's usually best not to engage. Using myself as an example, my primary creative interest is making games. I have a set of ideas and values that go into my games. Not everyone is going to agree with my ideas, and not everyone is going to share my values. This is okay. Ideally, I want everyone to find something they can like in my work, but with billions of people in the world, some of them are going to be my diametric opposite and disagree with me about everything. If this happens, it means I got a bad roll. Someone else in the world would love my…