Thread by @Xrayez

Even after quitting the Godot cult, sometimes I still find it difficult to believe that I used to participate in Godot cult in the first place... That's when you know how strong the brainwashing could get.

#GodotEngine #CancelGodotEngine

Godot leadership cannot kill you physically. But if you get indoctrinated by Godot followers and express critical thinking, you'll get emotionally abused: "you should not talk this way", "this is your last warning", "if you keep doing this, you'll be permanently banned".

Threats like above can really fuck up the brains of adolescents, and I suspect that there's a lot of younger people who use Godot at the moment. These kind of threats are disproportionate to the situations that arise at hand. And what for? Make people obedient? At what cost?

And I find it extremely disappointing that, as an #OpenSource project, Godot uses oppression techniques like these. This will not save Godot's image. This kind of attitude is not worthwhile. Just spend more time fixing bugs rather spending time shutting up mouths...

Why does Godot prefers one type of social groups over the other ones? Why Godot is so extremely defensive and encourages "us vs them" mentality? Isn't Godot an "open source, cross-platform and vendor neutral game engine", as @Akien says? 😛

Why Godot always creates never-ending hype about itself? Why is this needed? It's like again, they spend more time promoting Godot rather than making it a robust tool to be used. They always say that "something will be eventually implemented", and then you wait for years!

Overpromising is bad. It will get you followers quickly, but Godot will fail miserably if they keep doing this in the long run. They don't even have a concrete vision, development philosophy, priorities are messed up by whatever floats the bloat...

The cult leader, @reduzio, will say to you that he has solutions to problems in game development industry. But what kind of problems? Do you recognize my problem as a problem? Does community support for the feature warrants it being implemented?

Of course, there are no perfect solutions, but we'd like to get clear answers on what Godot's priorities are, it should help people to realize whether Godot is a good fit for them, especially for potential contributors that would like to improve the engine.

But it looks like the ambiguity with Godot is deliberate. Attract people from all around the world, ask them to donate via Patreon, and live a happy life being a cult leader... I'm looking at you, @reduzio!

If you didn't know, ambiguity is like gambling, it may create addictive processes inside the brain, and people get hooked to this. They create their own vision of a game engine that they've been "waiting for" and project it onto Godot. No wonder why Godot has gambling sponsors.

But of course, @reduzio has to reject all those ideas if he wants to prevent bloat. The problem is that he doesn't fucking care if you've spent a month or two writing the perfect proposal. He might as well ignore it and drink beer with the "Project Leadership Committee"!

To clarify, I totally understand how #OpenSource works. But the unpredictability of Godot's process makes many people disappointed, and it's even worse than a rejection. And rejections have a negative impact on people's brains, yet again. Save people's health, we are humans.

That's why I've been asking Godot leadership to be explicit, and most importantly, honest about what they do. But looks like they just want to delude people and get contributors for free, "inspire" them to work for free, and get lots of money from donators and sponsors.

I got so addicted to the process of contributing to Godot and helping others that I even neglected the development of my own game. I could've spent that time to achieve my own goals, and not goals of others.

And while it's fine to collaborate to achieve common goals, the healthiness of this totally depends if you find helping others to achieve their goals to be your goal in life, or whether achieving other goals helps you to achieve your own, and whether that makes you happy.

If Godot wants to keep everything ambiguous, they must stop overpromising at the very least. Make it crystal clear that Godot is community-informed, and not community-driven. Make it obvious right from the start that there's no meritocracy in Godot, not mentioning democracy.

However, I think they won't ever do this at this point. It's like getting caught in their own propaganda. If you spread propaganda for a long time, it becomes part of your identity. Saying that Godot is not community-driven would mean losing contributors, sponsors, and money!

Godot leadership wants to have a cake and eat it too. That's impossible. If you do want to attempt this, expect ex-contributors like me writing these things about Godot.

I am the byproduct of Godot's toxic leadership. Godot created me. Look at the people who hate Godot, they are not just random people. They have tried Godot or participated in Godot community, and they have a damn good reason to be angry about Godot.

To clarify: I'm not angry at Godot now. See me as someone who just wants to raise awareness of this issue. I've also found it fascinating to observe the cult behavior of Godot all over the Internet, so it's also a very interesting subject to research as well.

The reason why anyone can be roped into a cult is because humans as a species are social and we all have a powerful desire to belong to a group. It can be our greatest strength and weakness. In the case of cults, it gets taken advantage of.

Whenever people ask something that Godot doesn't like, they say: "This is not up for discussion". But why? Doesn't Godot follow the "open discussion" principle? They say there's nothing to discuss, because they somehow know in advance what will happen. Are you fortune tellers?

By the way, Godot's Code of Conduct clearly states: "Always assume positive intentions from others". But instead, they will yell at you and say: "You are insinuating that X and Y, and this is a really bad attitude to have". Really? Ask questions if you're not sure what I meant!

In either case, hopefully my feedback will improve Godot. If not (and likely not, because they don't want to read what I write), Godot will end up going into oblivion. Everything is going to die at some point, the question is: for how long you want to stay alive?