I like Svelte, but I hate it!
I’m angry, disappointed, and hopeful. Why do I hate Svelte? Why do I like Svelte, What are the positives and negatives of using Svelte? Should you learn Svelte? Is learning Svelte worth it? I’m going to answer them all.
Why I’m angry and disappointed?
- I got blocked for a lifetime from the Svlete Discord group.
- I got blocked for a lifetime from Svelte Github repositories.
- I got blocked for a lifetime from devto because of the article that I wrote about Svelte.
- Svelte isn’t a community project. It’s just an open-source project.
- Maintainers don’t know anything about how to manage a community, manage a group, or simply anything!
- Toxic people live in the community and the maintainers don’t do anything about it.
- MR. Rich Harris doesn’t involve with the community.
- It’s not good to use third-party libraries in your Svelte project!
I got blocked for a lifetime from Svlete Discord group
Svelte documentation UI sucks, right? In 2021 I designed a UI and a logo for SvelteKit. I sent them to the Discord group and we talked about the design and related stuff with some people in the group. In the middle of the conversation, suddenly I got blocked and removed completely from the group!. I didn’t find any of my messages in the Discord group. They probably cleaned up everything after removing me😄. You can download all UI and logo design source files I ever create for Svelte.
This is the consequence of trying to contribute to Svelte:
I got blocked for a lifetime from Svelte Github repositories
It was so hard for me to use this dropdown, so I decided to fix it and send a PR. I did it but I couldn’t predict what was going to happen after.
This is how it went:
And here is the comment that got me banned (this was removed after I got banned):
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 blocked for a lifetime from devto because of the article that I wrote about Svelte
After I got blocked from the Svelte repos on github, the same day, I write an article about what happened and I got blocked because of it! 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 replay to one of the comments on the article
I’m not sure but I think this is the reply that I write to the comment 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 with one of the maintainers of Svelte
This is the whole conversation:
This is what you can expect from a Svelte maintainer👇. After the above conversation, he unfriended me so I couldn’t message him.
I talked with another maintainer of Svelte
Everything went well🤩, 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:
Oh right, my fake Discord account 
got blocked after this. I guess don’t make silly mistakes like this😂:
Maintainers don’t know anything about how to 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, but for sure they will ban you for life for no reason.
If you are a back-end developer and this is everything you know, you don’t get to make decisions for example about the UI design. If you don’t know how to manage a group or a community, don’t even try it. Don’t do 💩 that you don’t know anything about.
Rich Harris doesn’t involve with the community
You can’t find Rich Harris in the Svelte’s Discord community. Since 2020 when I started using Svelte, I never see him in the community. There is no account with the name Rich Harris in the group. He is the creator of the Svelte and it’s impossible to see him interact with the community. Other people try to help each other in this group (other than the Svelte’s toxic members) but Rich Harris never came to say Hi! Weird right? Do not lie, I had a little bit of interaction with him on Github. I also see him replying to/answering some Twitter comments.
Last Talks
I like the tool but not everything that comes with it that it’s absolutely disgusting.
They are just showing you what you want to see!
They are telling you that Svelte supports A11Y, it even punishes the developers for not following the A11Y best practices! But the true story is that the Svelte documentation itself doesn’t even follow the basics of A11Y! Besides that, Svelte docs don’t even have a dark mode! This is a similar story to saying that we are gonna fundraise some money and give it to poor people but in reality, they don’t give an f^ck about poor people! They also don’t give an f^ck about developers. They are some most-requested feature requests in Svelte Github but they just don’t give an f^ck about what you need and about your opinions.
You can verify this by talking with other Svelte devs and seeing it with your own eyes in Svelte Github.
Stop punishing me for not following the A11Y best practices - A11Y 💩
Svelte punishes you for not following A11Y best practices and the Svelte team doesn’t give an f^ck about it. They don’t even provide you with an option to disable the warnings! So you end up with something like this:
Svelte doesn’t even fully support A11Y and it’s not smart enough to warn you whenever you don’t comply. Such a B💩
Other negative things about Svelte
I already explained some of the negative points of Svelte but it’s literally endless😐 So let’s talk more.
- Slow development (because of:)
- Bad (code, work, ) management
- Unreadable bad source code
- No documentation or roadmap or anything
- No role management for maintainers
- Toxic people in the community
- Not a lot of content available
- Not a great documentation
- Uncertain future with unknown features in the future.
- etc
About me
I’m a front-end developer. I have around 5 years of experience in development in general. I also have good knowledge and experience in UI design and Wordpress theme and plugin development. I’m a community manager since 4 or 5 years ago. I started to use Svelte in 2020.
How was I introduced to Svelte?
In a dev-related group, someone was talking about how Svelte is easy to use and etc. I jumped into the conversation and asked what about the performance? He sent me a screenshot of a comparison between Svelte and other front-end frameworks and Svelte was above all.
Thank you, Telegram. You are the reason that I have a backup from these messages😂🙏.