This is why we need to reject extremism in all its forms on both the left and the right.

We need to end cancel culture, not capitulate.

Or you could just never defend yourself. The people who don't like it will stop using your software. If the criticism was actually reasonable, and you chose to ignore it, maybe that'll backfire on you. If it was unreasonable, it'll blow over; you're not engaging with it, so there's no story.

That works if you're a CEO of a company and don't have shareholders to respond to, or your shareholders also think alike.

If you're a lowly employee with a family, doing some open source or blogging or whatnot on the side, and that side activity attracts the wrath of professional victims? You're suddenly in risk of significantly derailing your life (and that of your family!), possibly damaging it permanently. So you capitulate, just to survive.

This is why you be pseudonymous. If you're a bigot, it doesn't really help you (people will still stop using your stuff, and your pseudonym will gain a bad reputation), but it protects you from short-term reputation hits due to misunderstandings (like this one).

Sure, if you ignore them, and if you're not a big juicy target, the twisted zealots will eventually leave you alone. But who knows how much rot and corruption they will spread before they lose interest? And even if you can handle getting hate mail, or having your name plastered all around the internet with a cross-hair on it, what if it happens to your family, your collaborators, your employees, your employer, your customers?

You're acting like they're evil. They're not hunting for “big juicy targets”; they're trying to solve societal problems, and are working off the model that there are a lot of charismatic abusers out there, so people defending their actions should be treated with incredible suspicion. (In general, that's a bad attitude to have… but the harm of believing an abuser can be pretty high, so I'm not even saying they're wrong to take that stance by default, given how often they need it.)

If you're not charismatic – you don't try to defend yourself – they'll run through their investigation and find something or find nothing, and then give a fairly fair verdict (or as fair as anything on Twitter ever is).

In this case, the author could've engaged, probably, and said something like:

> This was actually meant to be sarcastic; you're meant to notice how unreasonable it is, and disagree with the narrator, but the narrator doesn't represent my views, which are [XYZ]. Your advice would be good, if I actually agreed with what I'd written, but the point is that it's outlandish and bad, because I'm calling out attitudes in the game industry.

> The feature I'm documenting there is usually used for bad. Your suggestions would be good ones, if I actually believed in that bad, but I don't. Do you have any ideas for how to make it more obviously sarcastic?

I think the author probably missed the boat on this, though; the Twitter mob grows quickly.

Lets remind ourselves that the original post in question is simply calling out in app purchases as evil corporate tools for extracting money.

The person who tried to warp this in to a social issue because they didn't like that they were being called out for using IAPs (being an abuser themselves really), is evil. This person is a harm to society.

Unless we're looking at different tweets, the person to tried to warp it into a social issue completely missed the sarcasm.

If they had the intention you think they had? Evil. But I didn't get that from reading the archive.is link upthread.