I Want

I had a nice blog post planned for today. Bit of recent news, a few quotes, discussion worthy. And then I lost my morning dealing with support requests. Warning; rant ahead.

I’ve released a lot of code and apps over the years. Between HL Twitter, Bulk Buffer, Plex Export and GPS Heatmaps et al I’ve managed to help several hundred thousand people (BB passed five million updates sent last month and will hit six million pretty soon). For the most part it’s been good. I’ve pushed out updates as and when I can and tried not to abandon too much code.

But the worst thing? The hardest thing to deal with? The entitled. Fucking. Users.

Everything I have ever made, I have given away for free. I might put a donate button on it, but ultimately I put in hours and hours (and hours) of my time making useful things and then I put them on the Internet for everyone to use.

And once it’s live I try and help when I can. Tweets and forums and emails, I can spend a couple hours every week just dealing with questions. Most people are courteous. Responses normally fall into “have you tried doing this?”, “that’s on the wishlist” or “it doesn’t support that”. But every now and then you get someone who just wants wants wants. It’s defective because it can’t do x, or they’re going to go away shouting because it’s not what they didn’t pay for.

It’s destructive. Utterly demoralising. Any enthusiasm I had for improving or writing a new app is instantly destroyed and the entire concept of giving things away soured. I’ve come close to just removing everything several times but always left it out there as I know that the vast majority of people are kind and considerate. A donation of $2 means just as much as $20 (to my feelings, maybe not so much to my hosting provider).

Maybe I just need to grow thicker skin. Maybe the Internet needs to learn to be a nicer place. Whatever happens, I hope I’m going to continue.

Until the next “customer”.