I feel that one should Encourage people to criticise them and try to get offended, because negative criticism highlights things where one can improve, including various falsehoods that one believes in, but are in fact false. (See: "All great truths begin as blasphemies"). On the other hand, if one only tries to hear flattery or yesmen, they are likely to get trapped in an echo chamber, and become surrounded by sycophants, and improve too little.
On the other hand, one should never try to please everyone because some people will always dislike some aspects of your work, and the best thing you can do is disagree and move on. Back when I referred a certain fellow open source developer (who is a Christian American) to my Star Trek: “We, the Living Dead” fan fic he objected to the use of the phrase “hot girls” there, and claimed I should delete the offending pages from my site. However, I refused because I didn't disapprove of using that phrase there, and even if I did, I'd rather not remove such offending material completely, but rather either revise it or add a disclaimer note.
A somewhat more involved case of criticism is Parkinson’s Law of Triviality or the “colour of the bikeshed” argument in which discussions about trivial matters which many people can understand are given disproportionate time. In this case, it is important to sometimes avoid insisting on one's preference. Recently, the local Israeli Free and open-source software community contemplated whether to use WordPress or a static site generator for the new linux.org.il site and when the consensus settled on WordPress, I accepted that despite the fact that I preferred the other option. That is because wasting time on such trivialities will not be fruitful.