[monkeypizza]

Right. I'm not saying eval(their net behavior)>0; I'm saying that if your response function is always negative, you lose the ability to influence their response.

Have you heard the one about the country with the death penalty for all crime? It just leads criminals to maximally try not to get caught, without regard to damage done [i.e. removing all witnesses to even the smallest crimes]. This isn't what you want; even within "negative" relationships both sides lose when you don't have a gradient of responses.

[sellyme]

The crux of this is that most readers presumably found out about both the bug and the fix in relatively short proximity, and their response is negative to the combined events, not to the knowledge of just the patch.

A criminal prosecuted for murder and petty theft simultaneously can't really go around complaining that they got 25 years in gaol for stealing an apple, but if everyone had already known about the murder and dealt with that accordingly it'd be pretty harsh.

(not that fixing a bug is exactly a criminal act, but the general principle remains)