This triggers me hard.

> One source of toxic behavior is entitled users.

It's hard to explain to people how insane things can get when you give away your work and time for free, in the hope that it will benefit people. Some things I've experienced:

  - People yelling at me in DM's when I didn't edit a podcast for community meetups in time
  - Alcoholics joining in on FOSS meetups because they wanted attention
  - People in the community getting spammed with crypto scams impersonating me that I had to answer to
  - My work being whitelabeled and sold to investors to raise money to the extent people accuse me of stealing from others
  - Smear campaigns making their way to my employer when I decided not to work on a particular open source project anymore
  - I gave away hardware to community members; the reward was tech support requests
  - Suicidal community members using me as a therapist (they claim I "saved their life"), followed by taking private (non FOSS) source code and giving it to to my competitors to advance their own tech careers

If you are going to get into open source communities you should go in with a plan for how you're going to deal with these kinds of things when they happen to you.

I'm sorry to hear about your experiences. I find it hard enough to deal with pushy people who have mismatched expectations (and yes, I'm not proud of it but at times I have been an entitled user.) I don't think what you're describing is limited to open source software though. Any time you make yourself available to the general population you're going to attract the full spectrum of human behavior. I guess the trick is to not make your project a honeypot for the debilitating stuff.

> I've learned to draw much stricter boundaries.

Could you elaborate on what has worked for you?

I imagine people who work in customer service have strategies too.

Unfortunately, a lot of this behavior is very common in online communities generally. Addicts or mentally ill folk with no outlet offline take it online to some authority member in the community, or really anyone who will spare them a second… the things this leads to can be absolutely insane. Sad all-around.

I wonder if the distribution of Weirdly Entitled users is higher in some groups vs others?

ie JS/Node seems to attract more newbie users, so I wonder if that correlates with higher incidents of this

That's with the thought that maybe it's newbie users mostly being that source.

Well this just made me feel a whole lot better (similar experience, though not as hardcore). Good lord.