The unfortunate truism about the internet, and I think this applies particularly strongly on Reddit, is "People are <i>d!cks</i> on The Internet". I maintain a few hobby projects and get feedback occasionally -- the only time I've had my work utterly crapped on was on Reddit[0]. I had forgotten about it until reading this, and really -- it upset me for about 15 minutes (I didn't even reply to the thread which had the unfortunate side effect of me not being able to find it now, a few years later) -- but I was <i>surprised</i> at how irritated it made me.<p>I recall a post on rachelbythebay.com about "The One"[1] that made me chuckle. These crap-raining commentators are akin to political pundits/talk radio hosts -- they complain, yell, excoriate and offer nothing else. Here's the thing, you may hate the library, that library may have a massive community who you feel is now writing bad code <i>because of that library</i>, it may be the library equivalent of The Antichrist, but don't crap on the developer. Most of the time it was a case of "He/she had a problem, solved that problem and shared his/her work". If you hate it or think any one of those prior things, <i>write something better</i>, offer up a patch, or at a bare minimum, advocate for a better alternative and do so in a respectful (and, preferably, thankful) tone[2] -- or don't, because you don't like it and your contribution of 'foo is garbage' isn't going to move anybody away from the product. Being a dick to a developer, especially attacking them personally, only serves the narcissist who's self-worth is strengthened by knocking someone else down.<p>There's a certain kind of entitlement mentality required by a person to think that a developer who release some <i>thing</i>, for <i>free</i>, with <i>code</i> and (often quite good) <i>documentation</i> on a platform that makes it easy for you to collaborate and evolve that product to somehow land on the idea that this developer now <i>owes</i> you something as a result of that kindness. I used to roll my eyes when I'd run into a very public mailing-list "I-quit" message, but I understand how that happens. At some point you just say "Who the f<i></i>* do you think you are?" and, more importantly, why am I continuing to give away my time/work/effort only to get grief?<p>[0] It was on a post I didn't author that got under 10 votes and 5 or so comments, one of which was aggressively negative.<p>[1] <a href="https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/04/28/meta/" rel="nofollow">https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/04/28/meta/</a><p>[2] "This 'foo' tool looks interesting -- I'd check it out but I'm really happy with how 'bar' solves the baz problem. I wonder, what is foo's approach for handling the painful zyzzx issue? My concern is that it may exacerbate that, or, minimally that it'll still be a problem that I have to solve in my code, as opposed to baz which abstracts that problem away for me. Am I misunderstanding that?" There's no need to stroke egos (or anything else); you can offer dissent, point out a concern, and not be a dick about it.