And how can this be improved ? Should “normies” be pushed into RTFM or ELI5 ?
I think the proper response is to simply ignore someone that ignorant
If you are dissatisfied with the free thing I gave you, then I am happy send you a refund of your purchase price. 🤷♂️
That’s my preferred strategy.
You should charge a restocking fee.
Convenience fee.
Not only is it normalized, but it’s being weaponized. See, for example, the recent XZ backdoor which was equal parts hacking and a psi-op against the maintainer.
Just fyi it’s psy ops, short for psychological operations.
Just ignore them?
This is one good reason not to publish any normie-accessible versions of your software. If you only provide the source and build instructions, your software will never get popular among the kind of people who demand free support.
That could get rather annoying. Imagine if when you installed your distro everything was compiled from source (I apologise if you use Gentoo or LFS), it would take a lot longer.
Also people could still just upload a binary to various package managers (assuming the source is available).
What’s the issue with just ignoring them? I really don’t think making open-source software intentionally obscure because annoying people exist is a great idea. Ultimately we want more people to use FOSS instead of corporate software.
Cutting off your nose to spite your face.
It takes time and energy to ignore them and only them specifically. They need to be filtered out, bug tickets closed and cleared out of otherwise useful channels. The alternative is you just ignore everybody interacting with the project, but that’s not a good solution.
People feeling entitled on the internet were always a thing.
“I paid for my internet connection, so everything I find on it should be free and come with support and modifications I request.”
This has to be a troll. They use Tails and do not know how to format an USB drive?
Fair point. An they managed to get their email delivered on that newsletter announce mailing list (Which I expected to be moderated). Not sure how that could happen.
Possibly they bought it from someone on ebay or something?
I’ve had tails “kill” a few USB drives. By that I mean windows wouldn’t recognize the drive with explorer and I had to use diskpart to reformat it, and the drive was fine. I assume this user doesn’t know that, but I think back then I just googled “windows won’t see usb” and got the answer so they should get good.
Windows refuses to recognize anything except the first partition on any storage device that it classifies as “removable”, so this tracks. Just zero the partition table, and Windows will offer to format it like it wants on next plug.
That’s not true. I have a 2-partition SSD that boots an on OS on one partition and has storage on the other, works fine in Windows.
The problem is that Windows’ Disk Management utility doesn’t zero unknown partition tables.
The post’s photo conversation seems like feedback moreso than complaining. 🤷
Believe me, no AI wants to steal your comment.
It was always normalized, but recently there seems to be more backlash from maintainers.
There are excessively clear instructions for tails on how to do exactly what they are asking. You can’t help people like that.
Is that you Jia Tan?
I am indeed seeing this with increasing frequency. Just take a look at threads about the Lemmy devs for examples. An increasing number of people seem to feel entitled to be treated not just like customers but as also as stakeholders/PMs for software that was gifted to the community.
As for how to try to change this direction, I think ELI5 on what FLOSS is and how it is governed, as well as how to be a good member of the community, whether as a contributor or otherwise, is probably the way to go.
I don’t think I’d ever complain directly to the maintainer. I often do find instructions that are essentially The Rest of the Fucking Owl but you go to the community for help and then give up when 90% of them act like you are an idiot for even asking.
God knows no wrath like a slightly inconvenienced and intellectually humiliated liberal.
Ok boomer.
Dealing with unhinged people has been around since as long as the internet. There was a period of time before the general population got online when it was mostly academics and military people, the level of discourse was higher. But useNet still had the crazies.
I think the federated systems and GitHub allow people to participate more, so the barrier to entry is lower, so we get to see more of this emotional labor then we used to historically.
