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Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

> Librivox is a non-commercial, non-profit and ad-free project

Wanna contribute, maybe? Instead of complaining about them giving you stuff for free?

Shouldn't they care more about UX than a random HNer?

Honestly I find this quite frustrating. I really dislike when folks like yourself take your product-focused mindset into open source/public domain projects.

These people are NOT BUILDING A PRODUCT. There ARE NO USERS. No customers. No investors. No business considerations. There are just contributors, donating their time and money to a project they feel is worthwhile.

If they don't want to focus on "UX," they don't need to. If a person who believes in the project lends their time toward improving UX, they can. But it's not the job of ANYONE, contributor or maintainer, to do anything that doesn't serve the existing contributors.

And I know that sucks for welcoming new folks. I know it would be better for a project to do outreach. To try to position themselves to bring in new members. Many such projects do that. But it sure is galling to suggest that it's a project's JOB to do something more when they're providing tons of free content to you. If it mattered enough for you to comment, go work on it!

This is like saying you shouldn't put any effort into your README.md because you're just a smol bean.

It's your project you just put all this effort into, yet a little consideration for the end-user is beyond the pale?

Again, go make a pull request if it matters so much to you.

They do it for free. They do whatever they want. If you want more, you can contribute for free (or can't you be bothered to do it?). If you don't like it, don't use it.

> Man, nobody at LibriVox can be bothered to

Did you ever bother to provide something useful for free? I mean other than your complaints (in case you consider them useful).

I built a few open source projects. And too many users are like you. They don't contribute shit but they come with their complaints because it's not enough to give it for free, they want it tailored for themselves. Because of users like you, I stopped caring entirely. My new personal projects are not open source, so that I don't get the complaints.

This x 100.

I have all sorts of open source projects including services I run as a charity for thousands of users.

If I'm going to build something for people to use, then I'm going to also think about consider their user experience. It's the same reason why I polish a README. Why would you drop the ball after all that work?

This is your opinion, and you are free to do whatever the fuck you want, precisely because you do it for free, in your free time.

I don't come telling you that your projects suck or that you apparently can't be bothered to mention them on your profile.

It has a lot to do with the tone you use. Had you said "It's a great project, I wonder if they thought about adding X", I wouldn't have said anything. But you said "Man, nobody at LibriVox can be bothered to", which is disrespectful. The fact that you don't seem to realise suggests that you are part of those people that make open source toxic (often not in purpose).

I have many examples where people came to my open source project and heavily complained because they struggled with something, or pressured me into implementing a feature for them (for free, obviously) or into changing the licence, etc. And when I tell them how toxic their behaviour is, many times they hadn't realise (some apologise, some are jerks). Still their behaviour is toxic.

When people do stuff for free, we should at least be respectful.

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