by Chase Chalker, founder of Chatter
Someone posts in your Discord server: βThe animation system is completely broken.β
A developer sees it while grabbing coffee. They share it in your team Slack. Now two engineers are looking into it. Your producer is asking if this should bump the sprint. By lunch, half the team is context-switching into a problem that might affect twelve people.
I call this a feedback witch hunt.
One person surfaces something that sounds urgent. It spreads internally before anyone can figure out if it's actually widespread. Everyone piles on because it feels irresponsible not to. Work stops. And two days later, you realize it was either a niche edge case or something you were already planning to address next month.
At Roblox, someone could post a detailed, well-written complaint on the DevForum about an API change. Within hours, it had 40 replies. Staff were pulled into meetings. Sometimes the complaint was completely valid and we were glad we caught it early. But other times it was one developer's edge case that got amplified because it was articulate and nobody could quickly tell if it represented five people or five thousand.
Large studios usually have community managers whose job is to sit between the community and the dev team. Not as a wall, but as a filter. They can say, βYeah, this is loud, but it's three people and we've been tracking it. Keep building.β Or: βThis looks small on the surface, but I've seen the same thing across Discord, Steam reviews, and two GitHub issues this week. Probably worth a closer look.β
Small teams don't have that person. The developer who checks Discord at 9am is often the same person writing code at 10am. They just see something alarming and react, because reacting feels like the responsible thing to do.
The emotional weight of one well-written complaint is enormous when you don't have data telling you otherwise.