The broader discussion but especially this little exchange reminds me of a similar situation with Ubuntu.
At one point they were the darling of the desktop Linux space and much beloved by an online community of highly principled people who didn't pay them anything.
Those same people then utterly blasted them when they tried a few monetization/promotion features that fell flat, like the Amazon lens in Unity. I had no love for that lens but it was easy to remove.
Shuttleworth gave a fairly telling interview afterwards which basically amounted to "Fuck these guys, you can never make them happy."
Canonical proceeded to focus on the server side where there's more money, fewer loud freeloaders, and now they're somewhat more evil.
There is also a whole strain of thought in SaaS which says don't ever have a free version because those guys always end up being the biggest complainers.
I think you have to accept that no company is going to get it 100% perfect and if you're too loud, annoying, and you're not giving them anything in return, they may just take their ball and go home.
Being the company that does the right thing is arguably not worth it, the devil's advocate argument is, some guy online is going to ride you even harder because you said you were trying to do the right thing, so better to stay quiet, or even cultivate an air of vague evil instead, then they won't bother.
Perhaps also related: the idea that riots are stupid, because rioters are inevitably protesting someone/something that's far away, even as they set fire to local businesses owned by members of their own community.
alt Hacker News
The broader discussion but especially this little exchange reminds me of a similar situation with Ubuntu.
At one point they were the darling of the desktop Linux space and much beloved by an online community of highly principled people who didn't pay them anything.
Those same people then utterly blasted them when they tried a few monetization/promotion features that fell flat, like the Amazon lens in Unity. I had no love for that lens but it was easy to remove.
Shuttleworth gave a fairly telling interview afterwards which basically amounted to "Fuck these guys, you can never make them happy."
Canonical proceeded to focus on the server side where there's more money, fewer loud freeloaders, and now they're somewhat more evil.
There is also a whole strain of thought in SaaS which says don't ever have a free version because those guys always end up being the biggest complainers.
I think you have to accept that no company is going to get it 100% perfect and if you're too loud, annoying, and you're not giving them anything in return, they may just take their ball and go home.
Being the company that does the right thing is arguably not worth it, the devil's advocate argument is, some guy online is going to ride you even harder because you said you were trying to do the right thing, so better to stay quiet, or even cultivate an air of vague evil instead, then they won't bother.
Perhaps also related: the idea that riots are stupid, because rioters are inevitably protesting someone/something that's far away, even as they set fire to local businesses owned by members of their own community.