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Comment by Wolfr_ | Hacker News Reader

Nice of you to look up those from my hundreds of tweets.

Now, since we bought Tailwind UI to do our work, we are technically also a customer.

Well, you mentioned being blocked, so I searched your name + tailwind.

Probably the company monitors the tailwind and tailwindcss keywords, saw those tweets, and decided that their signal-to-noise ratio for doing customer engagement would be better if they blocked you.

It's not a statement about your twitter account in general, or you as a person. It's just that their corporate objective wasn't served by your tweets. Now that your company is paying them, perhaps you can ask to be unblocked. Or perhaps not, as the support channels for Tailwind UI (the paid product) are GitHub, email and their private Discord.

I was just using my other Twitter accounts to stay up to date, it's not a big deal.

I just genuinely wonder if blocking people that don't agree with you is a good strategy.

I guess over time things also changed, Tailwind 2y ago was not the same as Tailwind now. They hired a bigger team and became much more of a company.

There’s a difference between disagreeing and being an ass. If you wanted to engage with them then try to have a conversation. All you did was say how terrible it was and not to use it. Big difference.

Nobody owes you their attention.

I agree, but none of those tweets were directed at the authors. They were just talking about Tailwind in general. One was a poor joke.

My 3 blog posts were a genuine attempt at trying to dissect what I didn't like about the framework. Many people wrote in to thank me for that perspective.

I find it unfair to single out two historical tweets neither of which is directed at the authors.

You do not like their product. They do not care to engage you. Win-win! Except that you need their product and they still do not care about you as a customer.

If you are going to trash my product, I'm absolutely going to block you. If I have a say in what the company that sells that product does, I will absolutely have that company block you.

Twitter blocking is not about owing attention, a Twitter block prevents the blockee from seeing your tweets. The company is basically punishing Wolf for their critical tweet.

No one is owed anyone in this scenario, but it's just crappy behaviour from Tailwind. They probably are just tired from the negativity, I mean just look at their site the framework does look terrible, they even admit to this with this quote on their site front and center:

"If you can suppress the urge to retch long enough to give it a chance, I really think you'll wonder how you ever worked with CSS any other way."

Even though the code is offensive to the senses, it apparently works really well. Judging from the adoption and the beautifully designed UI's they are showcasing people do recognise its usefulness.

This kind of crap is the reason it's much easier to block people who can't contribute or formulate proper criticisms and focus on properly submitted GitHub issues. All this is just noise

Those tweets are not just disagreeing.

He just disagrees if using tailwind is a good idea.

Where is the problem that justifies blocking?

> Where is the problem that justifies blocking?

You can block anyone on social media for any reason or no reason at all and you don’t have to justify it to anyone.

An individual, absolutely. But a company? The arguments in favour of “you can block anyone for any reason” don't really apply.

Sure, as long as it's not based on a protected characteristic or an interaction subject to a regulation. You have no right to interact with a company otherwise.

I'm not talking about legal rights; I'm talking about what is a sensible social convention. (Because really, you don't have the right to block anyone.)

You don't need a right to do it, because they have no right for it to not be done.

But social convention was my point - the social convention is it's always fine to block and you never need to explain, in my opinion.

You can, but should you? Doesn't that look unprofessional?

If they've decided to block someone, they've probably already decided that they don't care about looking professional to that person.

It's simpler than this honestly — the Tailwind CSS Twitter account is managed entirely by me (I made Tailwind), and I'm the only one who tweets from it and checks the notifications to see if there are people doing interesting work I can help elevate or having problems I can help with.

Seeing a bunch of incessant vitriol in the mentions all the time about something I've worked really hard on for many years is very distracting and upsetting to put it mildly, and on days when my emotional reserves are already low from the stresses of figuring out how the hell to make money working on the project or having a young family it's really not a healthy thing to have to deal with.

Criticism being delivered in good faith is welcome and productive, but constant holier-than-thou "wow whoever created this is extremely stupid compared to me and clearly has no idea what they are doing" is not that.

I've only ever blocked two people for this sort of abusive crap since 2017, in case that provides some perspective.

Tailwind CSS is a "company" now in the sense that Steve and I built a commercial product to make the OSS stuff sustainable, and it turned out to be successful enough that we could hire handful of other people to help out, but I certainly don't think of us as some sort of faceless corporate entity. We don't plan to grow the team and I don't plan to become a full-time manager — I just want to keep working on interesting OSS projects and we decided to use the revenue from our commercial stuff to make that possible by hiring people to help with customer support, working full-time on existing OSS things from the ecosystem (we hired the person who built the OSS Tailwind IntelliSense extension for example), and to keep up with the barrage of GitHub issues we see as a popular project.

Tailwind CSS itself is very much a personal project of mine and a labor of love, and for better or for worse it's not as easy to detach yourself from projects you pour that much into as people (who have no perspective on the emotional challenges of being the face of a popular and polarizing project) make it sound.

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