Dealing with trolls

Hey there, fellow instructor warriors! I’m Oli, the brave soul who unleashed my course onto Udemy back in June 2025. Since crashing into the Udemy marketplace and snagging a spot in the Udemy Business program, I’ve had the dubious pleasure of meeting a few internet trolls and naysayers who seem to also exist on this platform like weeds in a garden (yep, they’re everywhere online!).
Let’s face it— Pleasing everyone is about as likely as training a sloth to run a marathon! We pour our hearts into helping fans and supporters who adore our problem-solving genius, but then—bam!—we get ambushed by the occasional grumpy gremlin tossing out a bad rating. My latest adventure?
A mysterious “student” (who I didn’t even know existed!) slapped my course with a ONE-star rating. I mean, if zero stars were an option, I’m pretty sure he’d have gone for it—lol!🙄 It stings a bit, especially when you’re a new comer trying to build trust and a fan club of five-star cheerleaders.
But here’s my real beef: 1) This phantom left zero helpful hints on why my course deserved a zero-star vibe, and 2) thanks to Udemy’s Trust & Safety team, I learned these “Personal Plan” ghost students don’t even show up on my radar! They’re like ninja subscribers—no enrollment, no trace, just a ninja-star rating. I’ve got no clue when this shadow took the course, dropped it, or how much they actually watched. I’m just supposed to smile and nod at the rating like a clueless bobblehead!
I get it—we can’t win over every soul. But isn’t it a tad unfair that we can’t publicly clap back with some facts? At least with marketplace or UB students, we get a peek at their course interaction. With these Personal Plan phantoms? Total blackout—zero visibility! I’m left defenseless, taking it on the chin while my course credibility takes a hit.
I’ll give Udemy props for running its own show—being a public company, it’s all about the shareholders, not us instructors or students. But after some stiff, robotic exchanges with support and Trust & Safety, I’m starting to wonder if they’re even on our team. And reading through old instructor rants from the past few years, I sense a collective groan about Udemy’s “helpful” changes over the last 4-5 years—changes that don’t always scream “instructor love.”
This post isn’t meant to be a full-on Udemy roast, though—just a newbie’s bewildered cry! Am I the only one feeling this way, or are other instructors nodding along? Or am I just a paranoid fool chasing ghosts? Let me know, comrades!😵

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Comments

DamianMcKinnon

I'm really sorry you had this experience Oli.

You'll see idiots down-voting courses because of the overuse of the word "he" and it triggered them, or giving a rating of 1 because the one hour course was not accompanied by a 300 page ebook that the person could download for free. Some will vote you down because your mouth made a clicking sound a few times and they didn't like that. Some will write nasty comments because they couldn't understand your content or thought they would be able to do something by the end of the course that they couldn't despite your course description and landing page explicitly stating that they would need to have knowledge of a clearly defined list of items or that the course outcome was clearly explained and they didn't bother to look. Some will give you a one because the videos kept buffering - clearly something related to their internet speed. Some will complain about the subs even though you did not write a single one of them. Some will downvote you and complain in the comments that you are not knowledgeable on the topic although presumedly if they came to learn then they would not be knowledgeable either. And yes, some will just give it a one without explanation.

This is not a new topic and the only constant is Udemy will not be stepping up to help you on this. If you go back you will see this coming up again and again.

All I can say is stick it out. Once you gain enough positive reviews the negative ones have less impact in the overall math. Your skin will get thicker and their ratings will have less impact. It's an endurance race.

With that being said it's god's own mystery how the rating algorithm works. You'll see a history of complaints about that too…

CarlosMartinez

Oli, you’re definitely not alone in this. I made the mistake of giving trolls too much importance —reporting them, going back and forth with Trust & Safety—and all it did was frustrate me and ruin my mood. In the end, I learned the hard way that the worst thing you can do is engage, because that’s exactly what trolls are looking for. My advice now is simple: ignore them. Protect your mental health and focus on the students who truly value your work.

Oli_Hochberg1

Thanks Damian for your feedback. You're right, there are dozens of reasons leading some people to down-vote and rate a course very poorly. And it seems indeed that Udemy will not be stepping up to help us on this (that was the reason I posted this article .. to get some feedback from the community). As for your other advice, believe me that my skin is as thick as can be but like you said, in the early days, these really bad reviews impact tremendously our overall ratings, so I would not mind if I had 500+ ratings to my name, but it's not the case yet. That is why I take the fight with Udemy directly. And from my multiple dialogue with them, it seems that their algos do put more weight into higher % of course completion, and ratings accompanied by a written review so at least these ratings weightings make "more" sense, but the point in my original article was that these ghost students from Personal plan do not leave any "traces", so we, instructors, can't even draw some kind of conclusion as to what could have gone wrong with these low ratings students, or how much of a weight they pulled with their bad ratings. This info should be readily available to us, without having to demand it, since it is available for all other types of students..

Oli_Hochberg1

thanks Carlos. Except that I really don't want to engage with these trolls.. I know these types too well. But at least I wanted to engage with Udemy in order to either get rid altogether of some of these specific (1 star) horrendous ratings, or at minima, weight their ratings on the basis of their course interaction. This course of mine is almost 17 hours. And if you asked me, I would not eliminate a minute of it, because every part is essential and part of a bigger puzzle. The reality is that I understand that people might not have the patience to go through it all, or would expect immediate results out of it. But honestly , everything is clearly marked in black&white on my landing page and description of the course, so before choosing it, you'd know what to expect. And if the student has not given it a full try, then I would expect that they would have the decency to admit that to themselves and refrain to rate the course at all, or at least for udemy to understand that.

ChrisBankes120

With subscriptions it will be easy for a troll to rate several courses with 1 star anonymously. Perhaps to see if the 1 stars get a reaction - and then put on Tik Tok! Best to ignore unless there are comments.

PhillipBurton

It used to be that students could give courses half a star. That had twice the effect on your ratings than a 1 star review has. Thank goodness you can't do that any more.

DamianMcKinnon

There are so many ways this could be handled more intelligently - or at least in a way that places value on the instructor and the work they do. If a course gets a rating of 1 then it's flagged an viewed by Udemy before it's activated would be one. Or if a person claims a refund on a course then their review is nulled as technically all parties break even. It's a well known fact a tremendous amount of 3 ratings are given out by people who just want to skip the review popup and get to the next lesson. They don't mean to do damage but anything less than 5 hurts your rating. With a little effort there could be a middle ground here between students and instructors but it's clearly not something they want to invest energy into.