Thats fair comment, but how do you define the middle ground between sitting in an ivory tower and wondering what the next feature should be, between asking people who actually use your product in ways you wouldn't expect?

I release computer games, which are developed largely in secret and when they hit the market after 4-7 years people find all kinds of warts and issues that we never even thought of.

GitLab seems to be of the idea, "ask people what they need, make small incremental movements into making that happen and release those increments often so that people don't get jarred by changes"

I can support that, and I don't think it bears negatively on their integrity.

I'm not sure. Maybe I would try to integrate the product suggestions into the product more, along with just reaching out to users directly and generally conducting the product in a typical open source fashion.

What bugs me a bit is mostly the constant presence on the Hacker News forum, with this somewhat aimlessly customer-pleasing tone: "What can we do better? How can we improve your experience?" etc.

It seems like a premeditated PR/marketing strategy, which might be working well, but it's still off-putting to me.

Objectively, that's such an odd thing to be unsettled about.

Have we reached a point where all pleasing tones are considered marketing and PR? That we distrust people for acting earnestly?

It's in gitlabs best interests to be a superior product, right now they're an underdog, and their ubiquity on hackernews is not a coincidence, they're a YCombinator backed start-up.

Talking directly to people tends to focus the conversation too much without allowing outside perspective, you might want all of gitlab to be focused on CI, but I may think a casual CI integration would be more reasonable and likely a good solution is a middle ground- also, who do you ask? people rarely talk about their VCS unless it's relevant to discussion.

I fully admit that I'm a cynical and cranky bastard.

At least you're polite and well-spoken.

Asking what to do doesn't mean doing what they are asked. Turning suggestions into software features requires a lot of skillful software design and marketing work. There's nothing wrong with deciding, among countless incompatible options, to evolve the product in ways that appears likely to increase revenue, while not seeking feedback would be an actual bad sign about GitLab's ability to decide (and improve).

That's interesting, it's not how I read their interactions at all.

Asking the community for opinions is a great thing to do - you might get some good suggestions and the community then feel valued. That doesn't mean you need to do exactly what the community tells you, but taking it into account in the design process may help build something that the community actually wants to use.