Darn! I feel like I just arrived when the pub was closing. I’ve been contemplating the OP’s question and many of the issues discussed here for quite some time.
I joined the forum 4+ years ago, and it certainly is different, in several important ways:
(1) It felt more like a club. Posters like Anders Vinberg just sharing a philosophical thought for all of us to contribute to. Debates got heated but rarely toxic.
(2) There was a lot of optimistic hope. Roon was new and there was reason to believe it would quickly evolve into each of our individual visions. Of course that would literally be impossible but you can see it in the energized discussions about how to enhance X or Y function and all of the ideas being shared.
(3) There seemed to be more “how to?” and less of “I have a problem with this” types of posts.
(4) There were a number of posters that I felt I personally identified with – sort of my “clan” here. Not that others were of an enemy tribe, but we supported each other in posts.
Things have definitely changed. The club atmosphere is still present in the fluffier threads but there does not seem to be a sense of this being a shared hobby anymore. More like the local boxing arena to get out your road rage (and yes I do that sometimes…later regret).
However, I think #2 deserves a lot of focus. After years of hoping for various portions of Roon that I feel have been neglected, I’ve given up on that hope. I have a sense that these enhancements will never come, are not in the direction Roon has chosen to head, or that they’ll simply be too late to benefit me. (Case in point, the Roontag function for importing…would have been great had it been available when I first imported my collection…or had it been available before I had redone all that work as within Roon).
I see threads like “we want your ideas for playlists!” being revived and people posting on them, perhaps not realizing they have been long dormant, and my first thought, unfortunately, is “what’s the point?”
This is not meant to pile-on Roon or take the side of those who who only post critically. I’m here because Roon is a part of my every day life, like my teenager, and like with my teenager, I feel like I have to stay committed to try to make things better rather than throw up my hands and walk out. What Roon does well, or uniquely, are absolutely critically important and I have built a vast (value-less) technology empire on top of its capabilities.
But therein lies the rub. I’ll invite someone over to sample my vast empire, but the first thing I have to do is reboot everything and reset the image cache. I don’t want them to see Roon as flaky. But it is. Luckily not flaky enough to make it unusable (or even close to unusable) but there is no avoiding the irritation and frustration that goes into paying for a premium product and getting a mixed experience. And it is mixed.
So that frustration boils out here in the forum. That said, I don’t think one can reduce the increasing level of vitriol here to one particular cause. I think it’s multiple:
—the state of discourse in the world. Notably, political discourse in the USA, but just generally. There are few good leading examples.
—the pandemic hasn’t made many of us more tolerant or jovial.
—the growth of the Roon user base, sort of like a favorite restaurant that’s now too crowded.
—many of the forum regulars from past years are disillusioned and gone, and so the tone setters aren’t here. Some of the tone-setters that remain are those that enjoy the rougher discourse, or worse are not the most mature posters.
—Roon’s growing pains.
The latter deserves a little treatment. I agree that forum-based support used to look like it worked alright. It doesn’t look that way to me now. This post isn’t supposed to be about me, but just as an example, I’ve had a support request outstanding with NO response from support for 19 days. And this is after seeing a number of other posters with similar or the same issues also not get anywhere with the issue. Roon’s seeming (and I underline “seeming”) refusal to acknowledge the issue reinforces the belief that the forum is now overcrowded and you have to shout to be heard.
That said, I will end with this. I still feel just as I did when I wrote this last year:
PS if you read this whole thing you get a gold star!