Second reply from my laptop as mobile Firefox didn’t let me select text and ‘quote’ it suddenly:
That’s likely nostalgia-colored glasses. This never was the case, there was always a larger majority of abusive/entitled users.
What I’m more curious about, however, is this part:
Where does this sentiment come from? It’s popped up numerous times over the past 4-5 years, and has never been accurate at all, and similarly, why is ‘caring’ about the community/product in any way mutually exclusive with monetizing any functionality in the product?
Also, this is implying this trend was started by us. It wasn’t. We only went along with the community’s constant demands, but all it seems to have done is cause more and more resentment - ‘you’re not doing this good enough!’, ‘you’re dumb for not listening to even conflicting demands!’, ‘fix this shit I caused myself, but won’t provide any info for and is CLEARLY YOUR FAULT’, etc. - from either the same people or an opposed subset of the community.
We even tried fighting the constant tendency everyone had towards ‘monetizing everything’ and it led to the exact same resentment with the exact same narratives being posed. ‘why do you care if you don’t even fix [bug I didn’t report before]?’ and such.
This is nothing new. It wasn’t ‘better’ before. It always seems to have come from one side (us) with everyone else randomly hating everything tried here and generally not being helpful at all. Now we shipped yet another community request and yet again another subset is angry at this. When does this constant dissatisfaction towards us end? When will this project finally be fun to play or work on? So far all it is is an eternal sequence of pain and user concern. I wish it could all just end. Shut it all down, it’s no good anyway.
Sadly, can’t do that, too many people depend on downstream funneled funds from this project- always have, probably, even in 2016 someone would’ve just started a commercial-only closed-source fork of the project instead if we wouldn’t have continued on the project and ‘killed’ it outright, too many commercial interests even before we had any involvement in such.
Most of this isn’t even an issue with this project, but with general society nowadays. Are we now expected to somehow fix all of society?