Being upset that people are like "why aren't the financial updates on time, why aren't you explaining the downtime" is baffling to me. They built this site on transparency! Their funding comes with the expectation of financial transparency! Regardless of if people should put faith in the four randoms running the website, people have and it's definitely worrying when the "here's the forecast on how long the lights stay on" post isn't on time.
Additionally, it's totally fine to worry about adding on a ton of extra workload to the site. Remember when the bug report page was overrun with viagra and gambling spam for weeks because no one kept up with it? Or when the site was down with no communication. Apparently paid Artist Alley posts got backlogged. It took someone making two posts on here about horribly bigoted comments on a staff post before moderation happened because the official moderation channels were not working (and the one moderator of the site was a bit of a self-admitted coward in handling moderation of a bigoted comment!). And now you're telling me you're adding tag wrangling, a feature that AO3 seemingly needs a volunteer army for, to your site with no plans of making it sustainable? Y'all seemingly couldn't get one of the other three people of the four person team on the ball with the financial transparency posts that are part of your funding agreement, why should we be excited or hopeful for this new feature?
I get people really want this site to work for them. I'd love for any new social media site to work for me! But unless something drastically changes, the writing is clearly on the wall that this is not that site.
The other part of this that is always so baffling is when the owners of this site are equated to a "Starbucks barista who misspelled your name". They're the owners of the website! They work for themselves! They're not on the lowest rung of the company structure, they're not someone who is struggling against awful managers and management, they are the managers!
I talked about this several months ago, but the same person saying you're an "unfuckable cretin" for pointing out cohost doesn't have a reliable system to post the financial updates that are core to their current funding requirements was saying people should be bullied for saying the accessibility features on cohost weren't good. So they're owners that have to do it all by themselves, which is why you should bully people who criticize the site, but also they're just little cashiers with no say on how the site is run and it's rude to tell at cashiers and you're just displaying Karen behavior. Which is it?
It's frustrating. The goalposts feel like they're constantly shifting, where there's no right way to criticize this specific business or the culture being fostered. If you bring your criticisms up in staff posts youre an "unfuckable cretin". If you tell people to go to the official feature requests forum for accessibility features toure bullied relentlessly. If you criticize the site at all you're basically saying the cohost staff "are worse than some theoretical construct of Elon Musk & Mark Zuckerburg where their bodies have been grafted together in a permanent sixty-nine sexual position". It's silly!
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Just because your friends run an LLC doesn’t mean your friend’s LLC shouldn’t be criticized as a business. I guess I'll just add that just because you want this business to succeed doesn't mean the business shouldn't be criticized as a business.
