> A full third of them complaining about the anti-bot protection mascot (yes, it's a cartoon character; get over it)
If you're going to force people to stare at a screen with nothing but your quirky anime girl OC for a few seconds every time they visit your website, then in my opinion it's completely reasonable for those people to point out how immature it is. Telling people to "get over it" just makes you sound equally as immature.
The “branding of your captcha page is immature” point is a downside unless you consider it not merely self-expression but an intentional motivator for “more mature” (which not infrequently goes hand in hand with “financially able”) people to subscribe to a commercial offering, thus helping keep an open-source project alive and in an honest business, despite competition with a VC-backed behemoth that’s become nearly a monopoly.
> unless you consider it not merely self-expression but an intentional motivator for “more mature” (which not infrequently goes hand in hand with “financially able”) people to subscribe to a commercial offering
I'm fairly confident in saying that self-expression is the #1 motivator here and the commercial offering was an afterthought.
I don't have a marketing degree, but I'm pretty sure that if selling your software to professional businesses is the goal, making the non-commercial version feel extremely unprofessional is really not the best way to do it, considering most people are likely going to find out about the project's existence by seeing it, and it won't leave a good first impression.
> if selling your software to professional businesses is the goal
If that was the goal, this wouldn’t be an OSS project, would it?
When we are talking about FOSS, the goal is to keep the project alive and sustainable without burning out or starving. There are various ways people do it (such as making it your side project in addition to the day job, charging for bug fixes and features, etc.), and this one doesn’t strike me as the worst—making it partly your self-expression creates that extra bit of motivation to keep going, and if it serves as an incentive for people who find it otherwise good (some of which may in fact not mind the default style personally but wouldn’t go for it at their place of employment) to become paid customers then all the better!
Do these same people refuse to use Go because the homepage has a gopher mascot that could be straight from western children's cartoon courage the cowardly dog on the homepage?
FreeBSD because of the cartoon devil? Bash because of the GNU goat with the facial expression that could be read as smug or stoned? Google's logo is some printed characters in primary colours, is that too childish?
Nah, that people have such a visceral reaction to the anime girl is not just because it's "childish" as so much else of our industry is "childish" and passes without comment, or sometimes even causes criticism when it gets taken away for blandness (see all the complaints when projects redesign their logos to Helvetica work marks)
> If you're going to force people to stare at a screen with nothing but your quirky anime girl OC for a few seconds every time they visit your website
It is a damn sight better than the maliciously-compliant and deeply annoying GDPR 'we use cookies' banners, pop-ups, and dark patterns like having to uncheck thousands of 'partner' boxes.
This is merely a response to AI companies abusing scraper bots and having a callous, selfish disregard for Internet and server bandwidth. It was on this very website where I saw it put quite succinctly—AI-scraping bots have essentially started mass DDOS attacks on all small servers.
> immature
Maturity is empathy, human connection, understanding, perspective, compassion, altruism, and more. Not some arbitrary 'this is a cartoon, therefore it is immature'.
25 years ago Microsoft, the professional software behemoth, decided to put a cartoon dog and paperclip with googly eyes in its operating system and office software. A major mobile OS has a cartoon robot in its logo.
Cartoons are metaphors and windows into the artist's frame of mind. They are much more mature than your shallow portrayal of them.
If you're going to force people to stare at a screen with nothing but your quirky anime girl OC for a few seconds every time they visit your website, then in my opinion it's completely reasonable for those people to point out how immature it is. Telling people to "get over it" just makes you sound equally as immature.