Suggestions #1238
Description
Hey @Anarios
I'm sorry for what you're experiencing, the chans can be ungrateful little shits sometimes.
I wanted to give you some recommendations:
- Don't edit their comments, they like to re-edit their own comments claiming you edited them, making screenshots and well, posting these lies anyways out of spite.
- Their strategy is to doxx you into "their correct belief" which might be related to their oversexualized behaviors (I don't judge, but it's still kinda weird).
- They're very loud freeloaders and should be treated as such. They didn't care to commit/help/contribute in the past, so why would they ever really care?
- Be reminded that Open Source is not a mutual contract and doesn't have to be. You don't owe them anything.
Regarding your extension:
I'm sad to see that your hosting costs have exploded so much. As I see it, you have two options, where you evaluated one already by trying to get funding via a Premium API service or similar to fund the server costs. But I think that won't really work with this extension as there's not much benefit for companies other than seeing their downvotes which they probably can see in the YouTube API regardless (that they already subscribed to).
If you wanna make this a potential premium model, you'll probably end up having to implement a lot more features. Maybe a decentralized way to make comments without a login? Dunno, honestly, as there's no other extension that did this already and succeeded in surviving the market.
However, in the end I guess it depends on how much you care about this project. If you're able to let go of it, be rational and realize that it's draining your finances that could be enjoyed otherwise. Maybe you can take a break for a couple months without touching it, and come back to it to figure out whether you really wanna continue or if you want to find a different adventure.
As you've seen it's really hard getting a funding model for a project like this because of the freeloading problem. It's hard to being on par with the community's values, as they are non-existent.
If they could, they'd make you work for free and live under the bridge, while still demanding that you have to code more and maintain this project! That's how Open Source has to work, after all, right? Kinda /s, kinda not.
Maybe the community behind it isn't a great fit and it should be a different target audience (maybe influencers who want more honest insights across platforms? Maybe social media marketing companies?) but that's hard to evaluate or guesstimate while the bills are running hot.
If you really care about this extension after the break and want to continue building on it, I'd probably recommend trying to evaluate WebRTC as an offloading and peering strategy. Maybe a channel announcement link and an initial seed of ratios/upvotes/downvotes is enough to minimize the amount of data that you have to send and receive between clients and the backend. Depends on the typical ratio of read/write actions I suppose. But with WebRTC it could be rebuilt to be more independent, e.g. work on TikTok and other websites via platform adapters as it doesn't have to be so tightly integrated.
Anyways, just a lose text. Didn't want you to feel alone in this. There's still some sane people left on the internet :)