It's unlikely that there will be any further releases of mt32-pi

My speculation is that the demographics are mostly immature adolescents and young adults that never experienced the laborious effort of making something and thus have an entitled fickle mentality. I think gaming in general is like this.

Can’t speak to them specifically, but generally anyone of particular note or import is going to be targeted by those who feel sleighted. It’s why Celebrities get stalkers, why Influencers get “taken down” in hate videos, and why small project contributors eventually throw up their hands and say “fuck this” after having enough toxicity from the very groups they’re trying to serve or help.

Some people just cannot stand being a “lesser-than” in their own minds, and will rip apart others. It’s always been there, but the social media and data harvesting era of today has made it easier than ever to terrorize someone you just plain dislike.

I hate that they’ve been pushed to ending the project so abruptly, but I hope they find joy again soon.

The first thing that comes to mind is this paper:

”Aggression, Social Stress, and the Immune System in Humans and Animal Models” (2018)

It’s a review article on the research topic Anger and Interpersonal Aggression.

It reviews a lot of interesting knowledge from neuroimmunobiology to the sociobehavioral implications.

[dead]

My theory (as someone who's worked on a variety of open source projects, in various scenes) is that "moderately technical user" is the most problematic group to offer open source projects too. The heavily technical, software for software devs, side of things generally has you interfacing with people who have some experience with open source development, and the worst you'll run into are people who are aggressively trying to "help". On the opposite extreme, you've got stuff like VLC player, where a large chunk of the userbase aren't technically inclined enough to hunt down your feedback mechanisms.

The "power user" demographic simultaneously lacks the experience with OSS development to sympathize, and possesses the motivation/ability to hunt you down to reach out to you. Even worse if you end up stumbling into the realm of technically inclined children (Minecraft modding can only be done by completely blocking any form of player feedback).

A friend at a previous company revealed after years of working together that he was the primary developer on a popular console emulator. He uses an alias and keeps it all quite secret because the level of harassment that alias endures is horrible.

The idea of spending hours every day for years straight on something you have to keep secret from almost everyone just... really sucks.

It isn't unique to the emulator scene by any means, though I'm sure some domains are worse than others. (e.g. due to the amount of interest from unsupervised children, among other factors)

I think it's just simply that there is a tiny percentage of the population that is dysregulated (and a large portion that is dysregulated a tiny part of the time)-- once your project is seen by enough people eventually some of these people cast their interest your way.

The communications mediums we use and prevailing cultures (e.g. see "geek social fallacies") are highly vulnerable to abuse, and a few abusers with axes to grind can easily enlist additional abuse from large mobs particularly where communication is public and durable. As contributors patience wears thin they become more exposed, both due to reduced kindness trigging more abusers and their justified intolerance of abuse looking more unreasonable to outsiders.

For most open source development the incentives to contribute are pretty thin. People do it because they enjoy working with co-contributors, helping out the public, and getting some positive recognition. It doesn't take much to turn that net-negative.

There is some level of attack that probably improves friendships and social cohesion. When it's just one wingnut that shows up on your mailing list the community can nuke them from orbit and everyone (except the wingnut, I suppose) can feel good about it ("Can you believe that guy?" "I know, right?!"). But when the attacks are mild enough that it's not obvious if you should ban them, when they come in with a twitter army, when it just won't stop-- it can really sap the energy out of projects.

I think projects could improve by moving more of their regular workflow to invite-only mediums-- private repositories, issue trackers, etc. If someone wants to complain about your project then they can do it on their own forum, they don't get to use the projects tools as a platform to crap on the project and deprive the contributors of their freedom to ignore the noise.

But I'm not sure, the highly open culture today has advantages in gaining new contributors but even if you're willing to eschew those advantages the change in norms makes that less viable. In 1998 you totally expected to email some patches to the developers of a project then get invited onto their email threads or a private mailing list. Today because the norm is some open github repository it's not clear how many people would be willing to work the old way.

I can not be sure of anything based on a blog post of a guy I've never heard of until yesterday. I just said "watch out" to try to raise awareness.

I personally have experienced a lot of bad stuff too. It is sort of par for the course if you make popular projects. I'm lucky that I'm not that affected by these side effects of high profile projects.

But I've known of two different individuals I've collaborated with (I've worked with a lot of people over the last 30 years) who have suffered from real periodic depression and it exhibits itself as emphasizing everything bad and minimizing anything good and basically saying nothing is worth it. In the moment for these individuals they truly believe this, but it is actually a real depressive episode that is colouring their judgement. I think the depressive episodes have triggers, but most of what gets described as the cause and the situational problem is just a symptom of the depressive episode. At least this person is acting, the more worrisome type of response I've seen is a lack of action/withdrawal as that doesn't really fix anything and then it isn't clear how long the episode will last.

I didn't read it as victim blaming to say the author might have general depression. Because the cause of the depression here are clearly the assholes who took the joy out of it.

I did. I am not going to harp on this because it is unfair to the individual who is the topic of this post.

The sad irony of members of a forum named as such harassing someone who is indeed building a very old MIDI synthesizer for new hardware.

I did a quick search for references to mt32-pi on that forum and found nothing unpleasant. Maybe I'm missing something.

https://www.vogons.org/search.php?st=0&sk=t&sd=d&sr=posts&ke...

At least they are something that actually exists on their own, and not just a Microsoft cloud entity.

I've seen rough people everywhere on the internet, but that's at least very delighting.

> Some of the louder voices there are absolutely insufferable.

This sounds like one of those situations where if you just warned and then banned certain people, the community would be much better off.

Most of these appear to just be DACs. I want one with DIN in and out, a screen and some controls. The couple I can find seem to be gerbers and BOMs only.