I've found the MiSTer community to generally be pretty helpful, but there are definitely exceptions. The fact that its a project that aims to perfectly match the behavior of the original hardware leads to some strange arguments.
mt32-pi has been, and will continue to be, a source of great joy for many retro PC enthusiasts. For those of us with a particular interest in DOS music, it is huge.
Some modern projects generously give enthusiasts access to the power and functionality of (what might otherwise be $1000+ in) rare retro hardware, and in this hobby, mt32-pi ranks high among them.
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.
I'm just an observer, but from the outside, it seems like the emulation scene really, really likes to drive creators to drink or worse.
It takes a considerable amount of time, skill and engineering to create great emulators, and yet people still find reasons to complain or even harass developers of the projects they themselves are using.
It's just bizarre. I've seen some of it as a maintainer of some open source projects, but it's never escalated to harassment or what the OP describes. I really cannot relate to anyone that treats others like that.
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.
One thing to watch out for is generalized depression. It can make it seem that all projects are not worth investing in. It may seem to be related to this project but it may be a wider issue for the individual.
Sometimes responses like the OP's are the natural, healthy and expected reactions to reality.
It's insanely stressful and discouraging to be harassed, threatened, pseudo-stalked and have your work stolen for profit. Often the healthiest thing to do is to walk away from toxic situations and invest your time, attention and pursuits elsewhere.
That said, circumstances like these can certainly cause lasting depression. I just don't perceive the OP's behavior stemming from depression, it seems like a perfectly logical and healthy reaction in response to a shitty situation.
“ I have endured a sustained campaign of abuse from members of the VOGONS forum, been labelled a "clout-chaser", had threats sent to my personal email address, code been used in other projects without proper accreditation, my 3D print designs stolen and sold by faceless eBay/Etsy sellers, personal attacks made towards me when people don't get their feature request... the list goes on and on.”
I mean, perhaps they have depression, but this is pretty awful. It’d make me want to quit.
NO. I work on very public software, I receive pretty terrible criticism in reviews and email. Generally a vocal minority of people are unkind scammers and want it all for free and let me know. Blaming the recipient of the emails (victim blaming) or saying the individual may be suffering from wider issues is not on. It is irrelevant, it is their private life. At issue are the scum who scam.
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.
It's vogons dot org; it's a pretty wide range of folks with varied interest in obsolete hardware. Some of the louder voices there are absolutely insufferable.
There is genuine knowledge in the forum pages though, and if you're doing stuff for DOS/real-mode x86 there's a good chance you'll find yourself there.
I have to second the remarks about abuse from the Vogons community. There are members of that forum that are a blight on the retro computing landscape quite frankly. The abuse that I've seen them level at others for simply enjoying themselves is staggering.
When I debuted my own first major retro project, "Building the REAL Ultimate Windows 98 PC" [1] I went to absolute lengths to prove my research was done with such absurd meticulousness simply out of fear that I'd be targeted by Vogons and bullied into oblivion for it. I spent two years and thousands of dollars buying old hardware just to ensure every little detail was as perfect as I could make it.
Other much larger youtubers such as PhilsComputerLab received so much abuse over the years they straight up left the site entirely.
Another friend of mine was also recently harassed by a user on that site, snarkily editing all his posts with ".Deleted because it was useful but ignored." after giving useless commentary [2]
Vogons is a blight. The files hosted on it should be moved to the Internet Archive and the website allowed to sink into linkrot oblivion. There's very little useful information on it to begin with, just a bunch of angry old men smugly jerking each other off about "period correct" 90's computer builds
Readit News
Some modern projects generously give enthusiasts access to the power and functionality of (what might otherwise be $1000+ in) rare retro hardware, and in this hobby, mt32-pi ranks high among them.
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.
”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 Comment
It takes a considerable amount of time, skill and engineering to create great emulators, and yet people still find reasons to complain or even harass developers of the projects they themselves are using.
It's just bizarre. I've seen some of it as a maintainer of some open source projects, but it's never escalated to harassment or what the OP describes. I really cannot relate to anyone that treats others like that.
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).
The idea of spending hours every day for years straight on something you have to keep secret from almost everyone just... really sucks.
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.
It's insanely stressful and discouraging to be harassed, threatened, pseudo-stalked and have your work stolen for profit. Often the healthiest thing to do is to walk away from toxic situations and invest your time, attention and pursuits elsewhere.
That said, circumstances like these can certainly cause lasting depression. I just don't perceive the OP's behavior stemming from depression, it seems like a perfectly logical and healthy reaction in response to a shitty situation.
I mean, perhaps they have depression, but this is pretty awful. It’d make me want to quit.
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.
There is genuine knowledge in the forum pages though, and if you're doing stuff for DOS/real-mode x86 there's a good chance you'll find yourself there.
https://www.vogons.org/search.php?st=0&sk=t&sd=d&sr=posts&ke...
I've seen rough people everywhere on the internet, but that's at least very delighting.
This sounds like one of those situations where if you just warned and then banned certain people, the community would be much better off.
When I debuted my own first major retro project, "Building the REAL Ultimate Windows 98 PC" [1] I went to absolute lengths to prove my research was done with such absurd meticulousness simply out of fear that I'd be targeted by Vogons and bullied into oblivion for it. I spent two years and thousands of dollars buying old hardware just to ensure every little detail was as perfect as I could make it.
Other much larger youtubers such as PhilsComputerLab received so much abuse over the years they straight up left the site entirely.
Another friend of mine was also recently harassed by a user on that site, snarkily editing all his posts with ".Deleted because it was useful but ignored." after giving useless commentary [2]
Vogons is a blight. The files hosted on it should be moved to the Internet Archive and the website allowed to sink into linkrot oblivion. There's very little useful information on it to begin with, just a bunch of angry old men smugly jerking each other off about "period correct" 90's computer builds
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YETxI4rA_gs
[2] https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=95770