I think this will fall on deaf ears but what ever.
People are seriously over reacting and acting childish.
could have stopped here
Geekhackers? Overreacting? Never!!?!??!
I joined geekhack for the artisan community, the makers, and the designers, not to be Massdrop's captive audience so they can push their corporate agenda.
Massdrop isn't ponying up cash to buy this community because they have your interests at heart. They aren't interested in how you make refinements to Korean customs or how best to mix the colors for your artisanal resin. They are doing it because it will put money into their pockets. There is nothing wrong with corporate greed but I personally don't see Massdrop providing any value to the community. The goal of a distributor is to control the market and push out competitors and this is exactly what they are doing. This is exactly what AB Inbev does to craft breweries in their attempts to control distribution and the end result is not good for the consumer. Massdrop uses their market share to drive the profits of groupbuys towards their own pockets, resulting in increased prices for you.
Go ahead and take a "wait and see" approach, but I think folks are just in shock and denial. Massdrop will sit on the investment for a while until it becomes the new normal and then they will slowly start making subtle changes to further their own interests and justify the purchase. Legally they own everything you post.
I would rather geekhack died and the community move to other platforms rather than give it to these corporate interests. Massdrop has proven over time that they rarely, if ever, care about the interests of our community. Read up on the history of this platform and you will be terrified.
While I am, in my very nature, a sceptic, I think you are being very over sceptical about this whole thing. The only posts I've seen from you in this thread are about how you think MD are going to try and push their products on you, and how that is going to destroy your experience of the forum.
If you actually read the initial post past the "Hi I'm will from Massdrop and we just bought Geekhack" sentence, you would have seen their intentions, history in the community, the mods positivity around it, and the ethos that is trying to be pushed out to us all. Yeah sure, you can keep thinking that MD are going to turn into overzealous corporate overlords who will put banner ads everywhere, but I don't think you'll get very far in life with that mentality.
I want to take the statement at face value, and appreciate that MD have not quite saved us from a bad deal at the hands of the Chinese, but are willing to try and keep the community in the community.
Massdrop already have a presence on this forum, and to push it outside of it's current form would be a bad move in my opinion and they are going to get nowhere with their investment of however many thousands of dollars if they try pushing things that aren't keyboards to a keyboard community. We know Massdrop exists, we know what they sell, and they know we know what they sell. They don't need to sell themselves to us.
I obviously don't get the concern about being an artisan maker because I don't do any of that stuff, but how could MD possibly be encroaching on your business in that sense?
Now in terms of questions, I have a couple that I might add to as time goes on:
Q1: What do you want me to do with my monthly donation? Cancel or keep it going?
Q2: Will my @geekhack.org email address continue to work and redirect or will I have to contact someone about that?