Being an open source dev requires thicker skin than you'd think, and even thinker than most people have.

Either you go the community route where you build a loyal user base, listen to feedback, and have q community of contributors as well.

Or you go the 'I made something cool for me, and its open so anyone can use it too!'

The former is sustainable, the later is not if you domt maintain the idea that its yours first and only.

Once you start half listening to people using your stuff, but believe what you want is right, starts to isolate you.

You think all your users are stupid for their feature requests, because you don't need it. Plus you alone are in charge. Its your repo.

This ego can continue to inflate to this point. I've seen it in both closed and open source (anyone remever when the FSLabs A320 for Microsoft flightsim with malware? Just me?... Okay).

But this is by no means new.

It’s dictator syndrome. There’s always going to be a subset of the population that, after acquiring the faintest whiff of power or authority, seizes it like a drowning man.

Speaking as a nearly lifelong developer of one kind or another, with ASD and ADHD... there's a big ol' overlap. I'm not talking "the venn diagram is a circle" level overlap, but it is significant. Lots of people with these traits have personality quirks, differences in socioemotional processing from the "typical" stuff, experiences in early life, and other things, that can cause some pretty intense rabbit holing/spiraling when things get overwhelming.

To be clear though, this guy is obviously just a major dipshit. Nobody deserves being lumped in with that.

I think it's the pressure and the solo developer model

You put something out. It seems to be running. There are bugs. You fix them. There are more bugs (pareto is a PITA). You fix them too. Someone accuses you of sacrificing kittens in the basement. There are ideas for features and more bugs. Some worded in an entitled or just tone-deaf way. Very often you're the only one working on the project and saying "I accept PRs" somehow became received as a FU. It becomes hard to put the project away for just a week
You are perpetually in "I-fix-it" mode
Not to mention that in order to even start a project like that one needs to have at least a bit of "fuck it, I'll do it myself" mentality

It's a pity that !unfinishedprojects@forum.unfinishedprojects.net wound down. I hoped it might have been a space for projects to find communities. As we see around, it doesn't require a 10 person team with a kanban board to write something that works. But on the other side of the spectrum I think a project needs some sort of community around it. So even if there's only one dev, someone else could write the tutorials, less technical parts of docs, help new deployments etc

Confluence of stress burnout, and character traits.

Is worthwhile to explore both the psychological and societal precursors to such.

... Probably worthwhile looking into narcissism too. Albeit many perspectives on the topic, there are common themes and distinct insights to catch, that are sometimes difficult to really have sink in, so distinct and alient an umwelt exists behind the contrastingly "normal" facade. Until blow-out.

... Probably worthwhile looking into autism too. Maybe AuDHD specifically (whom are the majority). The absence of the socially normativising stuff, from the different neurophysiology, almost like we're having to do all the work of the cerebelum, the gpu, in the forebrain, the cpu, with the neuronal journeys having more finegrain, less pruning, and fewer main reinforced trunks, and so experience far more of the intricate detail all the way there, and all the way back... it's not just exhausting in itself, the extra brain power required for all the meta-navigation, only having the intricacies of side roads of working-it-out-now, none of the popular motorways of presumption, but also exhausting from the resultant clashes, and the cassandra syndrome, putting up with a majority who dismiss what you see in preference for their shared reality, regardless of how well it can be seen otherwise... no judgement on who's right or wrong there, only a consideration of what it's like, having to live like that. ... I can imagine that adds a whole other dimension of burnout to be experienced. And then when having found something that can accommodate you, avails a space where you're finally allowed the control you need to soothe your fine-grain sensitivities from that different awareness frequency range, gives you that peace, and then that area expands back into the social space, where there's still a different umwelt clash, each modality appearing stupid to the metrics of the other modality. And in the absence of support nor aptitude in that other's stubborn paradigm, for your own stubborn paradigm, whether you try to brashly persist in your integrity, or you try to bend to fit, it exhausts, either way. And then melt-downs and rage-attacks and so on can happen. Especially when got so close to it, and identified with it, this new thing you made that availed you such grace, that could save the world, that's part of you... and then these ungrateful swine come along and threaten it!? Yeah, I can see how such blow-outs could come about.

Especially bad if one has both autism and narcissism. The narcissism would preclude their any will whatsoever to self improvement. They'd have total aversion to accountability. No real introspection, and thus no real regret or apology is possible. Only pretence. If even that. Sometimes the grandiosity slips out of the mask of even the most covert narcissists (and community narcissists, martyr hero narcissists, vulnerable narcissists, etc). Narcissists, especially the true ones, where it has become their personality, and not just a rare incidental moment or rarer trait, in having itpped past the point of introspection, into delusional non-reality in fantasy love of their self image, no longer able to distinguish other people as other people, seeing them only as means to their own ends, and lingering in that, growing more machiavelian, psychopathic, even sadistic and demented. And in a way, a bit of a saving grace for us all, if the autism's louder than the socially manipulative covert machiavellianisms. Better the devil we can see [because they lack the social aptitude to hide], than the devil we cannot see [because they hide among us, pretending to be the paragons of virtue].

People who are attracted to computers often have emotional baggage. As a kid, I liked computers myself for that reason. I could escape the real world and have fun. The computer would do exactly what I wanted all the time.

Today, you have all kinds of emotionally unstable people using computers. The trans community are very much into computers as well, for the same reasons I did probably. Because it's a safe space when you are different.

And yeah, some people will use their tech skills to cause damage. Others to build something useful.

Do you think it's skill or just vibe code?