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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Do socially maladjusted people exist in similar numbers everywhere and open source is just a great opportunity to make their presence (unintentionally) known? Or is there something unique to this realm that makes them more prevalent?

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There’s nothing unique. Just the thousands of adjusted people don’t say a word so the negative comments echo louder even if they are the minority.

Anecdotally, I established a website in 2005 featuring long-form nonfiction, and it gained a respectable following. After years of posting several new articles per month, I started feeling the burnout, so I took a break, and then slowed my publication rate to one new post every few months. I soon became the recipient of a deluge of nasty emails from people who were furious that I had reduced the amount of free content I provided. This small, vocal subset of readers obviously enjoyed my work, otherwise they would be indifferent to a reduction in output, yet they were emailing me imploring me to kill myself because I am a failure.

I really wonder what their day-to-day internal monologue is like.

Ask a retail worker.

Entitled people tend to show their faces on some contexts, and hide it on other ones.

What is weird is that with free software developers the power relation has the opposite direction than the one where this normally happens.

I think it's two things. We develop our intuition for how many maladjusted people there are from our physical surroundings, but we're limited in how many we can meet and are unlikely to meet the extreme outliers; on the internet everyone is our neighbor. And then on top of that, they are overrepresented because they are much more likely to be removed from communities to arrive at new ones.

One might ask the same question about the entire internet.

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