(What feels like) a lifetime of maintaining open source projects has left me with some things to say about the haters. I'm not sure why.

Trying to do a light take of it instead of getting mad, here is a post categorizing them.

Raging hater

Your average online troll, the raging hater just needs to empty their bile on you. Usually not worth engaging tho I've defused a few and gotten valuable feedback over the years, but it takes great amounts of patience.

Verbose hater

I will try to keep this one short, unlike our first hater. The verbose hater writes a book of a rant and mostly exhausts your nerves by the length of it all. There is usually a point in there somewhere but it's so tedious to get to it and once you figure it out you just don't want to help them anymore.

Schrödinger's hater

This tweet by Marco Pivetta (named and shamed here with his permission because I don't hold it against him) is a prime example of this, even though a fairly harmless one. Schrödinger's hater is angry but you're not sure about what. Right now they could both be hating themselves and just venting, or hate something you did. Until you engage them to know which it is it's likely to leave you feeling bad just in case.

If you can get past the initial urge to yell back at them, I find it is usually worth asking for more info.

Illiterhater

The illiterhater isn't really hating you, but hates to read warnings and errors. They would like you to do it for them. For some reason they can read better when they're wasting someone else's time and they will probably write a long issue and make you ask three times until they post the output that contains a warning giving the solution to their problem.

The mirror hater

I can tell they hate mirrors not because of their shoddy haircut but because I am pretty sure they've complained before about a customer or user of theirs not giving them any helpful info at all and yet here they are opening an issue which contains no more text than "it did not work".