Derek Powazek 🐐Criticizing mastodon continues to be the least fun thing to do on mastodon.
Y’all realize that accepting criticism and mining it for good ideas is just what you have to do when you run community projects, right? And that lack of criticism means you’re failing, because people don’t criticize things they’ve given up on, right?
Dan Lyke@fraying as long as that criticism is coming from people actually participating in the project. There are an awful lot of "I might use it if.." people out there who won't actually.
@danlyke When people tell you what they need, they’re giving you a gift. You should take it and say thank you.
@fraying maybe. I have a project that people use, and I love their feedback, and that people don't use but have opinions about, and I measure their suggestions carefully. The project is a gift to a community, and it's important to us building this project that those attempting to guide us have similar goals and visions for that community.
@danlyke I don’t know the specifics of your community, and every one is different, but I’ve heard a lot of programmers discount valid feedback based on the person giving it too many times. Be careful about that.
@fraying in this case it's a music player for (Modern Western) square dance callers, there seem to be a class of people outside that target audience who delight in "this would be awesome if it did [this thing that has nothing to do with our intended application]". They're total stop energy, because they have no intention of using the project for themselves, and don't understand the target audience, or the use pattern.
And yet they keep coming.
@fraying I have seen similar patterns in my blog support for various social media interop technologies. Fanboys of a particular set of buzzwords who aren't actually doing anything with them.
Like the guys who used to approach everyone writing software asking for Linux support, but who weren't gonna pay for the software.
@danlyke okay, well, today I was talking about mastodon and what I see here is a knee jerk response to criticism along the same lines. Sometimes when someone says “I’d use it but I have these particular needs” they’re being sincere.