> It doesn't mean expressing your opinions about Hackernews, the thing or some proprietary software, even negative ones, is inherently wrong.

I agree. I’ve often wondered why open source maintainers get worked up over this. You can just ignore them. Odds are the maintainer spent zero seconds thinking about the person before the negativity over the course of their entire lives to that point. Why let them have free rent in your head now? Chuckle and go on not thinking about them for the remainder of your life.

There's a very good reason: we need the users to be aware of this, and exert self-restraint in communications with the developer team otherwise public fora become untenable and the core team, to avoid being pestered, will be forced to switch to closed, invite-only, comms channels (private mailing lists, private Discord servers, etc...). It's very valuable to be able to keep publicly accessible channels.