How not to make your users happy
When a developer says something like the following, you know they’re not really interested in what their users think - certainly not in understanding their motivation:
IM is about sending relatively short messages quickly, Pidgin isn’t a text editor, if you want to edit code use gedit or something. I see no reason why to have more than 3 lines, there’s e-mail for that. I think the devs share the same opinion, and I don’t think this is going to change.
(Apologies for digging up the past; although the Pidgin fork over the lack of a resizeable input field is old news, I hadn’t seen the comments on the now-infamous bug tracker issue yet and this was just stunning.)
There are numerous articles, blog posts and the like on the topic of building less what your users want than what they need (Kathy Sierra’s post - titled “Listening to users considered harmful?” is one of the better ones) - which is both freeing and burdensome to people who build software that actual humans must use (I count myself in both groups) - but it’s pretty clear from the tenor of the developer comments on that bug tracker issue that they have utterly missed the point.
And yes, we can argue ‘til the cows come home about it being an open source project, and people are free to do what they like, and if they don’t like it they can fork it or use something else or stop complaining, or… Frankly, if you’re not interested whatsoever in legitimate user feedback, I have to question why you’re writing software for other people in the first place.