How the toxic Laravel community destroyed my passion for coding.

I still remember it like it was yesterday, but it was over two decades ago when I embarked upon my journey of becoming a web developer.

I dialled up on my 56k modem, hogging up the phone line so I could browse some of my favourite websites. Then I wondered how I could go about making my own.

I figured out that I could do HTML in Microsoft Word. I created a document with scrolling marquees, gif's, and everything. It was glorious and terrible.

Then I started looking at the source code within MS Word, and everything picked up from there. I learned table layouts, CSS dropdowns, and landed my first real(ish) job working on a local classifieds website.

I had always copy and pasted my menus into every single page. There were no layout files or includes, it was just good old fashioned DRY without the D. Then one of my coworkers informed me that I no longer had to spend all my time editing every single page whenever a menu or logo changed. I could use this weird thing called "PHP".

As soon as I got home I quickly figured out that I could just create one menu file and include it in all of my pages. I was completely blown away by this.

Several years passed. I had learned almost everything there was to know about vanilla JS, CSS, HTML, and PHP. I even rolled a few of my own frameworks.

The frameworks were all terrible, but they worked, and they worked fast. I didn't even know what "frameworks" were at the time, until I stumbled upon a little thing called "Laravel".

I was hesitant at first. I felt like my way was the correct (albeit awful) way of doing things. I was almost offended. Why was Laravel so popular? I gave it several tries, but my ego kept pushing me back to my old ways.

Then one day I set that aside and really gave Laravel a try. It's been over a decade now and I still use Laravel to this day. I've created dozens of packages that have received thousands of combined stars, helped people out in forums and discord channels and SO. I also supported the devs by purchasing things like Nova, among other things.

That isn't to brag, or to make myself seem more important. I genuinely loved Laravel and was stoked about waking up each day to work on something new. That wasn't until I really got involved with the Laravel "community".

I was fairly active on the Laravel subreddit. I would try and help people out as often as possible, and got a lot of hits when I would share my packages.

Then one day, something changed.

The Laravel subreddit decided to hire some new mods. I didn't think much of it at first, until I noticed that the community started becoming much less active.

The mods decided to put a bunch of new rules in place. They were deleting and locking threads left and right. It was bizarre to me, but I still tried remaining active.

That was up until one fine day when I was struggling with a package I was working on. I was learning Tailwind and wanted to roll my own UI component package with it. My problem was that I wasn't sure how to "purge" all of the classes in my package component views.

So I did what I normally do. I went to the Laravel subreddit and asked if anyone knew the best way of doing this. Looking back, it was a simple answer; just add the package dir glob to the Tailwind config file when it is installed.

However, I didn't get this answer at the time. Instead, what I got was one of these new mods deleting my question outright.

When I messaged the mod to ask why they deleted my post (which had never happened before in years of being on the subreddit), I was muted.

This really pissed me off. It was like all of the time and effort I put into the community was just washed away with the click of a button.

So I decided to go onto an alt account and tell the mod what I thought of him. I found it completely absurd that this was happening. Perhaps I was in a bit of a blind rage.

The mod then decided to ban me from the subreddit entirely, and then complain to the admins to ban my account from the entire website. Accounts which I had for decades, all gone almost instantly.

While this was happening, I was also an active member of the Laravel discord channel. I would go into the help channel every day and answer as many questions as possible. I frequently had people offering to donate me money for my help, but always declined. It wasn't about money for me, I just really loved the framework and wanted to see people thrive with it.

In the past, I noticed that Taylor (created of Laravel) got some pretty disgusting treatment on Reddit. So much so that he had deleted several accounts of his own.

I thought, perhaps, someone on the Laravel discord channel might understand my frustration. So I mentioned what had happened on Reddit in the general channel, and asked if anyone else had experienced anything like this.

One of the discord mods (one who often gave rude responses to people looking for help, and also banned a 15 year old kid for sharing his first Laravel project in the channel) decided to shut me down. He told me this wasn't a place to discuss Reddit, and to stop. So I did.

Several weeks passed by. Then, suddenly, I got a notification on Discord. It was the Reddit mod who got me banned mentioning me. He had brought up the entire situation in an attempt to absolve himself of any wrongdoing. He posted cutoff and altered screenshots of our chats which made me look like a monster. Of course.

So I replied. I said what he was doing was nothing short of a disgusting display of dishonesty.

What do you think happened next? Did the Reddit mod get the same "stfu" treatment for talking about Reddit in the Discord channel as I did?

Of course not.

The Discord mod who told me to stop talking about Reddit immediately took the Reddit mods side, and even thanked him for posting about it. Literally thanked him.

Once again, I became furious. The guy who gets me banned from a community I was active in for a decade now gets to lie to everyone about what happened and is even thanked for it. Thanked by the person who told me to stop talking about it.

Even others in the Discord channel were confused. I distinctly remember members mentioning how weird it was that the Reddit mod brought it up after weeks of the issue being dead.

You'll never guess what happened next; I was banned from the Discord channel.

Even after all of this, I still kept contributing where I could, until it became clear that I was not in the cool club. I was no longer a worthy cult member. All of my PR's get closed with canned responses. I am at the mercy of people like Graham Campbell who make fools of themselves by claiming my code is "incorrect", then backtracking 3 times in the same PR comments in order to save his own ego.

I'm now at the point where I am just disgusted by coding in general. Every time I have to open up a work project I cringe. All of my side projects have been deleted. All of my MIT repos have been removed.

I tried jumping ship to Typescript / Node / Bun. It was fun for a while, but nothing seems to get the foul taste out of my mouth. I frequently create and delete projects in an extremely OCD manner, as if some unconscious defence mechanism is kicking in, to prevent me from wasting more time on something with zero return.

Now I'm completely at a loss. Each day it just feels like I am wandering through an empty desert, following a mirage of what once was. Web dev is the only thing I was ever decent at that I could make money doing and actually enjoy. It is the only career I could ever see myself actually sticking to. Now, I'm not even sure what to do with myself.

I should have been a plumber.

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