[QUrprUd1nCeicw]

That goes both ways my friend. Open source maintainers have a right to dismiss substance-free complaints without needing to prove P = NP.

Complaining about potholes is a great analogy. Repeatedly bringing up the pothole problem at the local swing dancing meetup isn't going to solve anything. You need to actually send your complaints to the transportation office. If they've heard about a particular pothole before then you don't need to bring it up again and keep sending them the same complaints. They already know about it. When they can't fix everything in time then the problem is either bad planning or lack of budget, and louder complaining definitely won't do anything about that.

[tjrDL6MjB2Zwwa]

shall I repeat myself?

> They have a right to express their opinion without needing said expression to have the goal of solving world hunger.

Just avoid calling someone to task for expressing an opinion that many others hold. They absolutely have the right to express what they don't like about Gnome.

[asdajksah2123]

And the person responding to them also has the right to express their opinion, that the person's opinion they're responding to is a shit opinion, whether or not it solves world hunger.

[QUrprUd1nCeicw]

No, I'll continue calling people to task for expressing their opinions poorly or falling back on these bad justifications. Cut that out please, you're doing it now. Responding with "well I have a right to express my opinion" is just a platitude, it's not adding anything of value to the conversation or moving the discussion forward.

The guidelines of this forum say you should post "anything that good hackers would find interesting" and it's not interesting to just complain and rant. Even moreso when it's the same boring things we've all heard before like "XYZ sucks" or "I shit on XYZ" like the parent comment was doing. The guidelines also say "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work" and that's what the parent comment was doing too. Please make your comments better than that or don't post here. Make a commitment to be better every day of your life and you won't have to worry about this. No one's asking anyone to solve world hunger, you're falling back on the usual HN hyperbole and snark. So you can just avoid saying that. This is a series of very simple personal steps you can realistically take to improve yourself and improve this forum at the same time.

And maybe I wasn't fully clear the first time. Sure, you have a right to do whatever you want. But that isn't useful way to communicate in a lot of cases. Just put a little bit of thought into it please? Imagine you have a new open source project. Some person comes and makes a complex feature request that will take you years to implement. You ask "why do you need this" so you can try to get to a simpler solution and they respond with "because I have a right to express my opinion." Ok? That's not really answering the question, is it? Now imagine looking at it as an outsider and you can tell how the person refusing to give explanations is the one being stubborn and evasive and stonewalling the discussion. You can't even blame the developer for that at all. This is a public forum, you're not having a casual bullshit conversation with your friends when you comment here.

Please also consider that your opinions could just be wrong, and other people may know more about the subject than you. Maybe you're not as informed as you think. If that's the case then you're doing active harm to people around you by propagating misinformation with those opinions. If you've been helped by receiving useful information from this site then you owe it to other people to make sure your opinions are helping them, not harming them. So you shouldn't just express whatever opinion occurs to you without thought and research.

I'm not trying to be negative here though. I've also seen lots of times here when people expressed their opinions in an engaging way, giving justifications and honest reasoning and useful suggestions. You can do it too, you just have to put in a little bit of effort and listen to the person you're talking to instead of just blindly saying "I have a right to express my opinion" at any opportunity.

[tjrDL6MjB2Zwwa]

I'm ending the conversation here.

You were being unfair, I pointed it out and asked you to try and avoid it in the future, and your response is a multi-paragraph rant about who knows what because it would require that I take the time to read it.

[QUrprUd1nCeicw]

No, I wasn't being unfair or ranting. This is a classic case of "accusation in a mirror." When I push back on people for "shitting" on things, someone immediately tries to flip the script and accuse me of ranting. If you change your mind and still want to talk, please be honest with yourself and admit you were being unfair by dismissing my whole comment without even reading it.

[tjrDL6MjB2Zwwa]

The ranting description didn't come into play until you decided to make a post that was 5-6x as large as anything else in the conversation.

your "immediately accuses me of ranting" didn't happen anywhere near immediately and I suggest you do some introspection to better understand why that was your reaction.

[QUrprUd1nCeicw]

It's still not a rant. You didn't actually read my comment so you can stop with the characterizations and asking me to introspect, because you've already admitted nothing you say has any relation to what I actually typed.

And yes, it did happen near immediately compared to other comments on this site. Please respond to my actual words next time instead of continuing with these rude, low-effort comments. I try to make my comments more informational and have more depth each time, you're not giving me the same courtesy. If I give a short response people complain they don't understand what I'm talking about. If I give a long response people complain it's too long. If I give a medium response people complain I wasn't convincing enough. So there's just no winning with you folks. This is another case where what you call "complaining" and "expressing opinions" is actually just "trolling" and "making excuses to avoid listening to anyone else's opinion." It's another accusation in a mirror, you need to be doing some introspection and figure out why you're being so evasive.