[longfacehorrace]

Looked at repos of the two loudest users in that thread; either they have none or it's all forks of other projects.

Non-contributors dictating how the hen makes bread.

[ronsor]

In general, caving to online mobs is a bad long-term strategy (assuming the mob is not the majority of your actual target audience[0]). The mob does not care about your project, product, or service, and it will not reward you for your compliance. Instead it only sees your compliance as a weakness to further target.

[0] While this fact can be difficult to ascertain, one must remember that mobs are generally much, much louder than normal users, and normal users are generally quiet even when the mob is loud.

[lich_king]

Yes, but also... that's like 90% of the interactions you get on the internet?

I don't want to be too meta, but isn't that a description of most HN threads? We show up to criticize other people's work for self-gratification. In this case, we're here here to criticize the dev caving in, even though most of us don't even know what Stoat is and we don't care.

Except for some corner cases, most developers and content creators mostly get negative engagement, because it's less of an adrenaline rush to say "I like your work" than to say "you're wrong and I'm smarter than you". Many learn to live with it, and when they make a decision like that, it's probably because they actually agree with the mob.

[throawayonthe]

isn't forks of other projects how you usually contribute code on github

[rurban]

Makes a good block list. Vehemently arguing to block AI

[blibble]

most of the anti-AI community have already migrated their repos from Slophub