NO. I work on very public software, I receive pretty terrible criticism in reviews and email. Generally a vocal minority of people are unkind scammers and want it all for free and let me know. Blaming the recipient of the emails (victim blaming) or saying the individual may be suffering from wider issues is not on. It is irrelevant, it is their private life. At issue are the scum who scam.
I can not be sure of anything based on a blog post of a guy I've never heard of until yesterday. I just said "watch out" to try to raise awareness.
I personally have experienced a lot of bad stuff too. It is sort of par for the course if you make popular projects. I'm lucky that I'm not that affected by these side effects of high profile projects.
But I've known of two different individuals I've collaborated with (I've worked with a lot of people over the last 30 years) who have suffered from real periodic depression and it exhibits itself as emphasizing everything bad and minimizing anything good and basically saying nothing is worth it. In the moment for these individuals they truly believe this, but it is actually a real depressive episode that is colouring their judgement. I think the depressive episodes have triggers, but most of what gets described as the cause and the situational problem is just a symptom of the depressive episode. At least this person is acting, the more worrisome type of response I've seen is a lack of action/withdrawal as that doesn't really fix anything and then it isn't clear how long the episode will last.
I didn't read it as victim blaming to say the author might have general depression. Because the cause of the depression here are clearly the assholes who took the joy out of it.
Well, we don't know what else happened in his life (at least I don't) and we all seem to agree that assholes demanding things and even use threats are a problem and not an easy to solve one.
