Counter-speech that seeks to restore democratic norms of public deliberation by showing disapproval of hostility or which supports victims using a non-hostile framing is a promising alternative to take-downs and top-down content moderation of online hate. However, to encourage and facilitate this sort of behavior, we need to know more about what motivates both producers of online hostility and those who engage in counter-speech against it. In this paper, we compare motivations and characteristics of these two groups – online hostile- and counter-speakers – and show that they are in many ways similar. Both groups are very vocal about their partisan stance, are frustrated by political institutions and perceive engagement in online political discussions as a form of modern, everyday political participation. Across different methods (qualitative analysis of 41 interviews with Danish online hostile- and counter-speakers; quantitative analysis of survey data from 20,263 Danish social media users; computational analysis of Twitter data from 5719 Danes), we consistently find that the people who post hostile content online are eerily like the people who post content intended to counter it – for some they may even be the same people posting at different points in time. The line between ‘haters’ and ‘counter-speakers’ is not always as clear as we may have thought. We discuss the implications of these findings for the feasibility of counter-speech as a strategy of content moderation in the context of political discussions.