Engage with people that have earned it in your eyes, whether by contributing to your project via code, assets, bug triage, writing a good and effortful bug report, whatever. Just ignore what the larger internet has to say about you and your creations.
Most people want to be helpful to others. This works fine when it is with a limited no of in real life interactions with mostly reasonable people. It can get wrecked by one or two unreasonable people, but the more fundamental problem is that it does not scale well, and the internet takes it to a far greater scale.
It is one reason so many of us essentially work for free for FB and the like: we do things to help others (advice and information), and the side effect is creating content and data for FB.
I don't think it has anything to do with the internet (whose scale pose many problems but not this one): anyone that founded a product/start up can tell you that people will give you “advices” and “suggestions” all the time when you talk about your project, and “don't listen to random suggestions from people you've just met” is one of the first advice you're being given when you're talking to other founders.
It doesn't even need to scale above a handful of people to be a nuisance that harm your project if you listen to them.
* lack information
* have a conflicting vision
* are being dishonest
I'm not a founder but I imagine that being integral to your own vision is the way to go. Attempting to cater to the conflicting needs of a diverse set of users isn't feasible for a startup.
But anyway this isn't valid only for founders but also to life, friends and family.
And yes they will go cry on reddit or HN or their own blogs and call you names. Ignore it. Be happy in the knowledge of the thousands or millions of people whose lives you have improved by your labor. Most of them wont bother to say thank you, but a few will, rememebr those. And be happy in the knowledge that the worlds is a better place because you exist in it, in however small a way.
The key is to realize that human psychology is by default not well equipped to deal with the internet. We tend to react much more strongly to criticism than praise. Recognize that in yourself, and gradually change it.
The distribution game is kind of stacked for the most likely to burn out to be the most likely to be important in the stack and in desperate need of help.
Especially considering the responsiveness here is responsiveness to the peanut gallery.
It would probably be good for the maintainers too. If being responsive is seen as a way to have a bigger impact, people might be inclined to become more responsive and burn out.
You're not wrong, and that's the first mistake: the individual running a FOSS project wants to see their project succeed and willingly bends over backwards to make it so.
The more you care about popularity, or even acceptance, the more vulnerable you are.
Decline with some boilerplate language?
Don't reward incompetence with a response -- are they paying attention, have they done their homework? (paraphrasing Maria Popova)
> How do you stop people from being mad that you’re ignoring them? (IME these types of people are likely to take things personally and start harassing you or complaining loudly in other forums…)
You don't (and can't) stop people from being unreasonable, mad, angry, or upset. That is their own choice. What you describe is bullying, plain and simple. Being nice to them because they might escalate later is counter-productive to your own mental health and gives them agency over your own time and energy. With bullies, the only way to win is to not play the game.
If you're working on open source as a hobby (as I do), you should make this very clear to your users. You work on stuff you want to, at the pace you find enjoying. You don't take contributions you think will be hard to maintain. You make it clear you don't owe anyone anything. You also accept that, often, the best answer to an issue/contribution/disagreement is a fork.
https://serenityos.org/ apparently only makes source code available. There are no binary images of the OS to install
I think Andreas said this functions like a little test -- if you're not willing to build it from source, then you might not be a good contributor. Or you might not be seriously interested in the project's goals.
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Likewise, my shell project provides source tarballs only, right now - https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.21.0/
It is packaged in a number of places, which I appreciate. That means some other people are willing to do some work.
And they provide good feedback.
I would like it to be more widely available, but yeah I definitely see that you need to "gate" peanut gallery feedback a bit, because it takes up a lot of time.
Of course, it's a tricky balance, because you also want feedback from casual users, to make the project better.