I’ve worked on open source software projects, some of them pretty major. And we had a sort of similar debate. In a non-capitalist software product, the users are not strictly required – particularly if they aren’t paying, you don’t really need them. Except that open source has this user->contributor treadmill that requires that some users become contributors in order for a project to grow. So you want to be as pro-user as possible, hoping and dreaming you’ll get patches out of the blue some day, or similar.

But what happens when your users become hostile or entitled. What if they do the equivalent of calling tech support and demanding satisfaction. The customer is always right, right? How much time and effort can you devote to them without detracted from what you were doing (coding). Eventually as a product grows, the number of hostile users grows. What do you do to manage this at scale?

Suddenly you’re facing the same problem Home Depot faces in your article, except your capital is not measured in dollars but time, motivation, mood… And you start putting up barriers in a similar fashion.