Svelte - A Journey of Hate and Frustration
Why I hate Svelte? What are the negatives of using Svelte? Should you learn Svelte? I’m going to answer them all.
About me
First, let’s learn a bit about me. I’m a web developer since 2019/2020. I have built open-source and paid WordPress themes and plugins. I’m currently working as a front-end developer. I have done freelancing. I have built websites and open-source tools and packages. I have maintained multiple dev communities. I also have good knowledge of UI and UX design. I started using Svelte in 2020.
I got banned from the Discord group
Svelte documentation UI sucks, right? In 2021 I designed a logo a UI for SvelteKit documentation (before the official documentation existed). I share them in the Discord group. I and some community members discussed the design and the related stuff (in a civil manner). In the middle of the conversation, suddenly I got removed from the group! Later when I joined (with an alternate account), I couldn’t find any of my messages. They probably automatically cleaned up everything after removing me. You can download all UI and logo design source files I ever create for Svelte, from here
This is the result of trying to contribute to Svelte:
I got banned from the GitHub repositories
It was difficult for me to use this dropdown:
So, I opened a PR and this is how it went:
Here is the comment that got me banned (the comment got removed after I got banned, that’s why it doesn’t exist in the screenshot above). Before we continue forward, read the content of the screenshot above.
He means Accessibility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_accessibility
Is my changes 100% accessible?😂 Such a silly question! Let me ask, is the Svelte site 100% accessible? Let me answer, it doesn’t even cover the basics. Now I’m confused because I didn’t see any PR’s from you related to accessibility. Why is that?:
- You don’t know what accessibility is. Maybe you do because you sent me a wiki link about it😂.
- You don’t care about accessibility but you mention it in public.
Did you (@dummdidumm) look at the commits? I’m sure you didn’t because then you would know that I know what the heck accessibility is and I spend a good time making sure that it’s accessible. But you didn’t bother yourself, did you?
previous commenters didn’t look at what is changed, didn’t look at the code, not even comments, and not even the commits. “Oh you did this but I don’t know why!”, You would know why, if you just take your time to review instead of questioning me.
Thank you (@dummdidumm) for the article, but it’s not related, because you don’t use a select box for page navigation😂. It’s like using a banana🍌 instead of a telephone📞. Just because it was used before, it doesn’t mean that you need to keep it🙂.
It has keyboard navigation support. It’s not a select box, so we don’t need to use aria stuff like how explained in that article. I should have used nav. It’s a hardcode test, it’s not a community project. If you do something wrong, if the maintainers don’t like you or for any reason, you’ll be failed.
Just because Microsoft and Apple did something, it doesn’t mean that it’s right. I’m sure some people going to say “Oh you think you are smarter than Apple and Microsoft?” 😂 Let’s don’t fool ourselves. Those products have problems that we are all faced with. Even there are some problems that they didn’t fix since years ago.
Regarding the bottom buttons, I’m not sure if the change is needed, since the previous styles are also consistently used on other pages. @bluwy
I’m not gonna explain how horrible the old buttons are. @babakfp
Please do, else this is just personal preference which is no good argument because I for example like the previous version better. @dummdidumm
“Hey, explain this thing to someone that didn’t bother to read the commits, or to someone that didn’t even read the code comments” No thanks😂
Mr. @pngwn, if you see any problem in the code, you kindly ask the author to do the fixes (and of course, you explain the problems and why and how). You don’t just close the PR. There are 100 open PRs and you just couldn’t help yourself not to close this one.
we don’t want to introduce unnecessary dependencies for simple functionality like ‘click outside’.
Sure, just reinvent the wheels because who knows, you just don’t like adding packages👏. Hearing this from someone that uses Svelte!🙂 (Not good for Svelte😂). “Oh, it’s not good to import 20 line of pure Svelte component package into your project, it’s very bad”. Don’t let MR. Rich sees it🙂.
I’d encourage you to open an issue before making pull requests like this. Closing until that conversation has taken place.
I saw a problem and I solved it. What is the need for an extra step? You can analyze my PR with the current version and in any subject, it is way much better.
I don’t understand why it has to be like this with the Svelte community.
- I designed a UI and a logo for the SvelteKit and sent them into the discord chat (it’s a related topic/group). Some users came and say their opinions. Didn’t like any of them but as I said, they were an opinion with some more or less reason behind them. I and other users talk about this stuff and suddenly I see the chat removed. As you guessed, I was completely removed from the community🙂🙂. [🖕🏿] mail this to the person that removed me. Thanks.
- Two times or so, I asked a question on the discord community and got replies like (You have a problem if you are trying to do just think/task. No one in the world does that, so you have a problem, and…)🙂.
- I decided to play with Svelte source and see what’s up… My hours were wasted because of the poor documentation. I created a PR and explained very well, step by step how to set up Svelte to develop it.
I created a PRR last time and a few users comes and say (“Ah, it’s bad”, and “I didn’t like it”). Just some nonsense comments. I ask a question in the discord chat, and someone comes and says “Why do you need that, that is bad, you shouldn’t do that”. I Design a UI for the SvelteKit website and send it into discord and some people come and say “dark mode is bad” and…, it was fine because these comments simply were an opinion. But then I see I removed from the discord chat🙂
This is the result of contributing to svelte:
I got banned from Dev.to site
After I got banned from the Svelte repositories on GitHub, the same day, I write an article about what happened, and my account got restricted because! This is the article:
Hi
Honestly, I do like Svelte (SvelteJS, Svelte Framework) but there is a big problem…
Today, I create a PR request and it got me blocked.
The short story is that the community is toxic. You can find really good people (Svelte discord group) but a single toxic person can ruin everything (It’s more than 1).
This is my deleted comment content:
@Rich-Harris Hey, you may want to read this🙂
He means Accessibility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_accessibility
Is my changes 100% accessible?😂 Such a silly question! Let me ask, is the Svelte site 100% accessible? Let me answer, it doesn’t even cover the basics. Now I’m confused because I didn’t see any PR’s from you related to accessibility. Why is that?:
- You don’t know what accessibility is. Maybe you do because you sent me a wiki link about it😂.
- You don’t care about accessibility but you mention it in public.
Did you (@dummdidumm) look at the commits? I’m sure you didn’t because then you would know that I know what the heck accessibility is and I spend a good time making sure that it’s accessible. But you didn’t bother yourself, did you?
previous commenters didn’t look at what is changed, didn’t look at the code, not even comments, and not even the commits. “Oh you did this but I don’t know why!”, You would know why, if you just take your time to review instead of questioning me.
Thank you (@dummdidumm) for the article, but it’s not related, because you don’t use a select box for page navigation😂. It’s like using a banana🍌 instead of a telephone📞. Just because it was used before, it doesn’t mean that you need to keep it🙂.
It has keyboard navigation support. It’s not a select box, so we don’t need to use aria stuff like how explained in that article. I should have used nav. It’s a hardcode test, it’s not a community project. If you do something wrong, if the maintainers don’t like you or for any reason, you’ll be failed.
Just because Microsoft and Apple did something, it doesn’t mean that it’s right. I’m sure some people going to say “Oh you think you are smarter than Apple and Microsoft?” 😂 Let’s don’t fool ourselves. Those products have problems that we are all faced with. Even there are some problems that they didn’t fix since years ago.
Regarding the bottom buttons, I’m not sure if the change is needed, since the previous styles are also consistently used on other pages. @bluwy
I’m not gonna explain how horrible the old buttons are. @babakfp
Please do, else this is just personal preference which is no good argument because I for example like the previous version better. @dummdidumm
“Hey, explain this thing to someone that didn’t bother to read the commits, or to someone that didn’t even read the code comments” No thanks😂
Mr. @pngwn, if you see any problem in the code, you kindly ask the author to do the fixes (and of course, you explain the problems and why and how). You don’t just close the PR. There are 100 open PRs and you just couldn’t help yourself not to close this one.
we don’t want to introduce unnecessary dependencies for simple functionality like ‘click outside’.
Sure, just reinvent the wheels because who knows, you just don’t like adding packages👏. Hearing this from someone that uses Svelte!🙂 (Not good for Svelte😂). “Oh, it’s not good to import 20 line of pure Svelte component package into your project, it’s very bad”. Don’t let MR. Rich sees it🙂.
I’d encourage you to open an issue before making pull requests like this. Closing until that conversation has taken place.
I saw a problem and I solved it. What is the need for an extra step? You can analyze my PR with the current version and in any subject, it is way much better.
I don’t understand why it has to be like this with the Svelte community.
- I designed a UI and a logo for the SvelteKit and sent them into the discord chat (it’s a related topic/group). Some users came and say their opinions. Didn’t like any of them but as I said, they were an opinion with some more or less reason behind them. I and other users talk about this stuff and suddenly I see the chat removed. As you guessed, I was completely removed from the community🙂🙂. [🖕🏿] mail this to the person that removed me. Thanks.
- Two times or so, I asked a question on the discord community and got replies like (You have a problem if you are trying to do just think/task. No one in the world does that, so you have a problem, and…)🙂.
- I decided to play with Svelte source and see what’s up… My hours were wasted because of the poor documentation. I created a PR and explained very well, step by step how to set up Svelte to develop it.
I created a PRR last time and a few users comes and say (“Ah, it’s bad”, and “I didn’t like it”). Just some nonsense comments. I ask a question in the discord chat, and someone comes and says “Why do you need that, that is bad, you shouldn’t do that”. I Design a UI for the SvelteKit website and send it into discord and some people come and say “dark mode is bad” and…, it was fine because these comments simply were an opinion. But then I see I removed from the discord chat🙂
You can see the PR request from here.
@richharris
I also replied to one of the comments under the article:
Hi
It’s unfair to me that I got blocked from the community (2 times) for no reason. I’m not a terrorist, not even a rude person on the internet, I’m just a developer, like every one of us that likes to create stuff. So it means that it can happen to any one of us, even you.
Would you like to suddenly get removed from the community, in the middle of the chat? You get no answers no explanation. You just get thrown out like the morning trash.
Would you like to spend your time (the time that you never gonna get it back) to fix/create something, and at the end, some guy to throw it away?
I spend a few years of my development journey helping people, answering their questions, and managing the group. I was a time that I was available 24/7 only for the community to answer them, it was like an olympiad game combined with the squid game. It was wild.
If someone says “I want to learn x and y”, you don’t just go and say “this is the course link. bye”. If someone is sending ads, you don’t just block its account, if you care, you will try to act for the best for both the user and the community. You can’t say “ah, this user is kinda annoying”, I’m gonna remove him. I see something from a user, what do I do? I search for all of his messages in all the groups we both are in. I read the messages and see the engagement, what he and other users talking about, and how much his knowledge is about x and y topics, I analyze so many stuff and in the end, there are some options (remove, keep, valuable, need more info, she is cute).
I talked to one of the maintainers of Svelte
This is the whole conversation:
After that conversation, they banned me:
I talked with another Svelte maintainer
Everything went great🤩, just kidding. My heart got broken! To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much. I was expecting the same. Whatever, this is the whole conversation:
I open another PR and it got my alternate account banned from (GitHub and Discord) 🙂
Hm, so I had this alternate GitHub and Discord account 
. I dont’ know how, things got messed up, so as result you can see my main account as a contributer to a PR that I opened with my alternate account! So, I guess don’t make silly mistakes like this😂.
I open an issue to report a bug and I got banned
My other alternate account got banned from accessing Svelte GitHub repositories. Check this out: SvelteKit #7260
They don’t know how to maintain and manage a community
Svelte maintainers don’t know what the heck they are doing. Did anyone see the Svelte Summit live 🐕💩 video quality? They don’t even try to do a good job. Svelte maintainers never managed a community before so they are doing dumb 💩 all the time. You can easily find toxic people in Svelte’s GitHub and Discord community and the maintainers don’t do anything about it (they are actualy a part of that toxic community), but for sure they will ban you for life for no reason.
For example if you are a back-end developer, and back-end is all you know, you don’t get to make decisions about the UI! If you don’t know how to maintain and manage a community, just step the fuck away.
Rich Harris isn’t active in the community
Since 2020, when I started using Svelte, I have never seen him sending any messages in the Discord public community. I think they have a separate private server for the maintainer themselves, but I haven’t seen him sending any messages to the public servers. He is the creator of Svelte and you can’t find him anywhere in the Discord community, it’s weird. It’s less likely, but he may reply to one of your comments in the Svelte or SvelteKit repositories.
They are just showing you what you want to see
They show themselves to be very supportive of accessibility, but their documentation website doesn’t even follow the basics of accessibility! They have some simple linting features, but the problem is these features are opinionated:
- You can’t turn these features off.
- When you use a standard feature of the web platform, it may yell at you saying what you are doing is bad/wrong, when it’s actually not.
- They don’t always work correctly, it may result in incorrect linting suggests.
You can achieve the same features with a linter, and you can even customize it however you like, but with Svelte, you need to suck it up and it doesn’t matter how much and how many people complain about it. Svelte punished developers for not following their stupid broken accessibility warnings (DX = 💩).
Since there is no option to disable these warnings, you end up with something like this. Whenever you run the app, and navigate to a page, you are going to see a bunch of these warnings.
Go to Svelte repository: A11Y issues and read through all of the open and closed issues. Example: Svelte #7626
You can also go to Svelte documentation and SvelteKit documentation, you don’t need to do anything complicated, just open up the lighthouse and do a little accessibility check, and see the disaster!
Since 2020 (as far as I know), Svelte documentation doesn’t even have a dork mode. SvelteKit documentation didn’t have a dark mode for more than a year. Why adding such a simple and easy thing that users asked for years is so hard for them to add?!
Svelte is opinionated, not community-oriented.
Update 2023/04/06 :)
On 2023/04/06, I responded to a message in the Discord group using one of my alternate accounts. In my reply I said something along the lines of the problems that I had with Svelte, like how they removed me from the Discord group and banned me from the GitHub repositories, and how Svelte has poor and incomplete documentation and how it doesn’t even follow the basic accessibility rules, like how there is no dark mode toggle for years, something so simple and easy to add, and how there has been a lot of open issues that a lot of people were asking for basic and necessary features for years and none of them is addressed yet! I also talked about the inconsistency in Svelte and SvelteKit, for example in some places we refer to words like “svelte” or “sveltejs”, “kit”, “sveltekit” etc. I also talked about road map for version 4 of Svelte and that it’s not going to have anything interesting.
When a new major release is announced, developers expect many exciting new features and improvements. The reality is, there aren’t going to be any new features or anything interesting in the latest version of Svelte, this can be disappointing for people who were excited about the release. Instead, it’s a good idea to include a few important new features in the release to show that Svelte is still being developed and to create positive buzz around it. So, this was what I was talking about in my reply message.
So, what happened? As usual, I got removed from the Discord group, and all of my messages got deleted. They also started talking behind me:
So, I created a new account and sent the below message, and again, I got removed :)
I got banned from the Svelte YouTube channel
There was a live stream on Svelte Society channel. I sent some comments in live chat and decided to check whether I was banned or not. The answer is of course yes. I was shadowbanned from sending any comments on the Svelte YouTube channel. In the screenshot below you can see on the left browser window there are comments sent by (babakfp), but you the right browser window you can’t see those comments.
Contributes to other repos vs. contributing to Svelte
I submitted a small pull request to a repository 
, and here’s what happened:
Here’s what happened when I contributed to Svelte: I designed a logo and created a documentation site for SvelteKit. However, I got banned from the community when I discussed my work, and the same thing happened when I opened a pull request and reported bugs. You can find more details on each of these incidents by reading the full article.
Thank you, Telegram. You are the reason that I have a backup from these messages😂🙏.