Comment by refulgentis
2 days ago
Smells like unnecessary sycophancy: I grep'd Adam in every comment and every single. one. is positive and phrased like this.
I grew up on this site, from 20 year old dropout waiter in Buffalo to 37 year old ex-Googler. One of the things I'm noticing me reacting to the last year or two is a "putting on a pedestal" effect that's unnecessary.
I think context matters here. People are being kind to someone who just had to lay off most of their team because, despite their project’s popularity and success (maybe even because of it), a massive change in the ecosystem completely destroyed their business model.
I’ve never been a huge fan of using Tailwind personally, but I deeply appreciated that they were making a (mostly) non-enterprise FOSS model work in an interesting way. It’s a shame that it seems that’s likely dead in the water now.
Perhaps if you’d simply read the thread you would have also seen these comments, which don’t name Adam but are addressed to him:
> We can't make it easier to use our product because then fewer people will visit our website" is certainly a business strategy.
> You are telling your customers that getting money from them, is more important than providing a service to help them.
This is madness. Some stories actually have good guys. I don't know Adam directly, but we have plenty of second degree connections. I've benefited immensely from his work, have never heard anyone say a single negative thing about him, and I genuinely believe he's done more to push the web forward with Tailwind than the larger players have done (certainly more than Facebook did with React and Google has done with Angular/AMP/etc).
Reflexively assuming that unanimous positive sentiment towards someone is itself an indication of a problem is exactly the reason people are writing posts as recently as (double checks) _yesterday_ titled "65% of Hacker News Posts Have Negative Sentiment, and They Outperform" https://philippdubach.com/standalone/hn-sentiment/
No one said he isn’t a good guy. Just that it was weird to have 15 comments saying “ignore the haters you’re a good guy!”
The “madness” here was you replying as if I said he wasn’t.
I'll be sure to avoid you during a time of crisis...
1 reply →
[dead]