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I'm not in the beta (just used the download link above) so sadly I lack such a channel. But broadly in my experience your suggestion simply doesn't work. Betas are for bug reports. Criticism of the code never makes it to the dev team, period.

On the other hand, it strikes me as quite likely that some of them read HN...

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This might sound ridiculous, but Valve are actually really good at responding, or at least reading, emails sent right to the top. If you just send your thoughts to gaben@valvesoftware.com, I'm sure he'll forward it to whoever it's relevant to.

(I say this from experience - I sent him an email saying I thought the end of Half Life 2: Episode 2 was really fantastic stuff, and got a response back from the script writer, who he had forwarded the email to :])

I've always been curious - is it known whether Gabe himself actually reads emails from non-employees sent to that address, or could it just be an assistant that handles routing most of the emails? I really can't imagine how he could possibly have time to deal with a public email account, but maybe I'm overestimating the volume of email he would get...

One 25-employee company I was aware of during the first .com wave had at least three different people handling mail sent to the CEO's public address.

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