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LibreOffice and the art of overreacting

blog.documentfoundation.org

111–120 of 152 posts

Re: LibreOffice and the art of overreacting

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyway, most people don’t want to interact with office type documents, right? The only reason I have it installed is to deal with a problem usually generated by some big organization: documents that aren’t available in an accessible format like Tex, markdown, or html. Let the people generating the problem pay for it.

You are in a bubble. Most office workers want Word documents and Excel spreadsheets (or something equivalent) not markdown and numpy.

People been running libreoffice just fine in french administration.

They even prefer it to office because they are used to it now.

Re: LibreOffice and the art of overreacting

#112
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that disgusting? That's an extremely common revenue stream for charities. I know some charities where the majority of their income is derived from wills.

Consider the situation where someone who’s geriatric and potentially losing their mental faculties is getting hit with messages like that. Catch them at the wrong moment and they could well change their will, despite it not being what they would have wanted.

If the person is geriatric and losing their mind, there is much worse on the internet than a suggestion about their will when making a donation.

Re: LibreOffice and the art of overreacting

#113
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this same feeling with donating blood (in most EU countries you don't get paid for this so it is completely charitable). If you have donated blood, every 2-3 months they will send you an e-mail for a new donation cycle. That's fine. But if you don't respond, they will send another reminder. Then a text. Then they will call you. Yes, you can just click the "Not this time" button, and click the reason for denyin…

One of my favourite criticisms, yes their procedure works, but it probably doesn't measure rejection rates. "We hounded these 1000 people for a donation, 60% responded favourably". Okay, but out of the 40% that didn't respond how many are you never going to see again? Who were those 40%? My wife works in a line of business where up-selling is a debated issue. Most of the industry thinks it's good, because they see mo…

I still remember giving the SF Symphony money and being aggressively hounded for two years and them repeatedly failing to remove me from their lists.

I love the Symphony and support their mission but it is hard for me to imagine ever giving them a donation again. It seems like it's inviting ruin.

Re: LibreOffice and the art of overreacting

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The response is fine. Entitlement and, really, some of this crosses the line into bullying of the foundation and the maintainers, should be dealt with robustly. It will help to reset expectations around what's reasonable for the relationship of those developing LibreOffice with the community of users. People need to recognise that they get a huge amount of value out of LibreOffice, for which they aren't required to p…

It doesn't look professional when you loose your temper, this article is comparable to that. When reading it, I kept thinking that the writer was too emotionally involved.

The article is professional.

Re: LibreOffice and the art of overreacting

#115
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my favourite criticisms, yes their procedure works, but it probably doesn't measure rejection rates. "We hounded these 1000 people for a donation, 60% responded favourably". Okay, but out of the 40% that didn't respond how many are you never going to see again? Who were those 40%? My wife works in a line of business where up-selling is a debated issue. Most of the industry thinks it's good, because they see mo…

I still remember giving the SF Symphony money and being aggressively hounded for two years and them repeatedly failing to remove me from their lists. I love the Symphony and support their mission but it is hard for me to imagine ever giving them a donation again. It seems like it's inviting ruin.

I always donate anonymously when I can because the deluge of “old people spam” is never worth it.

Re: LibreOffice and the art of overreacting

#116
I'm all for this. Unobtrusive and just enough to put it in folks mind. I'm not a big fan of the Author though.

How come there's no photos of the before/after? That would be much more useful than the condescension. They treat the reader like they've already whined with the least reasonable complaint. But they don't even bother to make their case properly, just point fingers at who else has done it, as if that's reason enough.

Wikipedia is NOT a good comparison. Their banners are obtrusive, obnoxious and the reason I stopped my $1/mo donation more than a decade ago. Well more specifically the begging/crying prompted me to look into their finances and spending and it turns out they were pretty irresponsible at least then. Lots of highly paid "administrators," software devs working on poorly thought out systems. Lots of interfering with volunteer contributions.

Re: LibreOffice and the art of overreacting

#117
post #99
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh. The persistent nagging fundraising drives are probably the main reason I haven’t donated to Wikipedia even though I feel like I should. One time I donated to a Red Cross appeal and over the next decade I’m certain they spent more than my original donation on spamming me with physical junk mail trying to extract more money from me. Never again.

Same with political donations in the US. I gave to one campaign 10 years ago and I've been getting consistent requests for donations since. So now they all get marked as spam. The first one came right after my donation. I guess it works for them but it's crazy to me that all these orgs basically make you regret ever donating in the first place. Ironically, though, I've donated to Wikipedia and they've never bothered…

Political donation spam is a plague. I ran a donation website in 2018 and 2020 that split up money among many candidates, and by far the biggest complaint was the flood of email that came after using my site. In 2018 there wasn't even an opt-out button on ActBlue. In 2020 they added one, but the default was still to share your info. But it doesn't even really matter, because campaigns continue to buy and sell donor lists, so once you're in the system, you'll never get out.

It's a legal problem, in that spam laws simply don't apply to political campaigns.

But fundamentally it's a collective action problem. Excessive fundraising messages hurt the overall brand of the party and politicians in general, but for each individual politician, the advice from consultants is that each extra message has marginal value. This is actually true for out-of-district messages—they might get your money, but if they piss you off, they still don't lose your vote.

There is some movement to try to fix this.

Oath (oath.vote) is an ActBlue alternative that doesn't share your phone number or email address with campaigns. They can't erase you from the system, but at least they're trying to do the right thing.

Eventually, if groups like Oath, Crooked, Emily's List, etc. can all team up and say, hey, you won't get donations through us if you keep spamming people, we might see some change.

I assume things are also bad on the Republican side. It would be easy to say it's good if their brand suffers—but actually, I want them to start behaving more responsibly, including in this area.

Re: LibreOffice and the art of overreacting

#118

They lost me at putting "overreacting" in the title. If that's the way they react to negative user feedback, they deserve more of it. Even Microsoft sometimes caves in if enough people complain - recall is now optional and I believe opt-in; there's noises about maybe not sticking AI in everything and letting you turn it off in future versions.

This is just belligerence and hostility cloaked in concern. This isn't a for-peofit enterprise that will regress back to Internet Explorer toolbar hell if we don't keep reminding them that we don't like it. This is a community-led effort, which you trust enough to run on your desktop, but apparently don't trust enough to not go wild with donation banners. What level of trust is that? Trust only as long as it benefits…

Trust and user experience are two different things.

I would trust them not to spy on me and not to gather data for behavioural advertising whether they had no banner, a banner, or an autoplaying video every time you start Docs. I just wouldn't be equally happy with the product in each of those cases.

What bothers me is not the banner itself but their reaction to it.

Someone who handled this better recently: Mozilla got user feedback on their AI integration, and added an off switch.

Re: LibreOffice and the art of overreacting

#119
post #19

I disagree with take on Wikipedia or Wikimedia there was a lot of trash talk because they were totally obnoxious with their fundraising. I donated once to Wikipedia and then I was getting Jimmy Wales in my mailbox basically like everyday. That actually drove me away from ever wanting to donate to them. Then there was a lot of talking if they really are so much in need of money but that's different topic. In contrast…

Why not just click the “unsubscribe” button on any of those emails you complained about getting? Seems like blaming marketing for a lack of self-agency to opt-out, but I suppose we each have our own metrics. I’ve donated, got emails, clicked one button, stopped getting emails. Guess it just seems the complaint is very solvable, but I do partially understand your point.

I tend to mark them as spam (and hope that it causes them problems send email) if I didn't explicitly sign up for them. I'm not going to be polite about it if they aren't.

Re: LibreOffice and the art of overreacting

#120

I've noticed a very sudden uptick in users of FOSS software being so low trust that they will see a small change, assume it's much larger, and then retreat to some rationalization that it's still bad when shown it's pretty small (slippery slope / boiling frog type arguments). I'm not too familiar with this story in particular but I have been following the Systemd birthdate field controversy, and it's exhausting. I do…

Well, we can certainly disagree about the harms (fingerprinting) and slippery slopeness (AV started for porn, but we all knew it wasn't going to stop there)

But to get to the meat of your question, trust is lost through betrayal. Organizations have been deciding unpopular policies without consulting their users, or having meaningful methods for users to opt out or push back. For a long time, users assumed open source would be the last bastion of privacy and user freedom, and then were shocked when those values were not actually shared by maintainers.

The paternalistic perspective that the organization knows users hate something but push it anyway is always going to lose trust. That practice needs to stop, and instead consider how open source can treat the user base as important stakeholders.

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