When criticism is treated as disruption, a community stops being a community

Off-Topic
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I came to Homey from Hubitat because its moderators systematically closed threads that became critical, uncomfortable for the company, or simply too popular.

I moderated a car forum for many years, and the tone there was often much harsher than anything I have seen here. We warned users who became impolite or made personal attacks, temporarily suspended them when necessary, and closed a thread only as an absolute last resort—usually when widespread personal attacks made a constructive discussion impossible.

That is why I am shocked to encounter increasingly similar behaviour here.

Threads are closed with arguments such as the discussion no longer contributing to a solution. But before closing them, was the thread creator ever asked whether the discussion was still useful? Were the people actively participating asked whether they wanted it to continue?

I no longer feel that this is primarily a community forum for users. It increasingly feels like a company-controlled platform where critical discussions are tolerated only for as long as they remain convenient.

Criticism should be seen as an opportunity: an opportunity to listen, to understand recurring problems, to show customers that their concerns are being heard, and to incorporate that feedback into future product and support strategies. Instead, critical discussions are cut short, and the company simply moves on.

Athom increasingly risks becoming another Samsung or LG: a company where customers and revenue are counted in millions, while marketing becomes more important than making existing customers feel valued.

I have been close to leaving Homey more than once and moving to Home Assistant, or perhaps Gladys Assistant. Each time, I stepped back because I genuinely like this box and still want Homey to succeed. But more and more, I feel as though Homey itself is pushing me away.

I have written five apps for Homey, and there is room for more. Yet I increasingly understand why several developers still have excellent apps in the store that are no longer actively maintained, and why some of them never publish anything new.

The people who invest substantial time in the platform, try to understand what happens under the hood, investigate what goes wrong, and are willing to help improve the system should be among Homey’s most valuable community members.

Instead, they increasingly seem to be treated as personae non gratae.
@ulrikb @deejayreissue @Rammstein @Doekse

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Athom almost never closes topics. The only two I’ve seen are these (1, 2), for which the reason of closing them is very obvious.

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Pascal, thx for your lines, at the moment its hard to find the right words, i really dont know how i should write all my thoughts here because aim sad about what I am experiencing here…i cant believe it in which direction this good and positive thread run…basically we only want to solve our Thread problems together with Athom and maybe we can help them to fix problems for the future and now the thread is closed…???..its unbelievable for me because aim a new Homey User, full of hope - enthusiasm - happiness to find here a community with people who helping each other…I never would have expected that, even then Doekse came on board, i thought now we have full power this is what we need to bring the Thread topic on track…but obviously I was mistaken,…i need time and come back…good night.

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Thank you for noticing what I brought to that thread, @Pascal_Nohl A lot of it was not about Homey at all. It came from other systems and from experience gathered elsewhere, and I know that made it awkward to place. But it was meant as a contribution to this product, not as a comparison for its own sake. You are one of the few who read it that way, and I appreciate it. :slightly_smiling_face:

@Emile, I would like to put a question to you, since you wrote the house rules.

I opened that Matter thread in January. It ran for seven months. I measured, I compared, I wrote things up, and I offered my full logs to anyone at Athom who wanted them. I did that because I wanted the problem solved.

That approach was welcomed at the time, and I would like that on the record here.

There was also an open door to take it further.

I said yes to that, and I still mean it. I would like to set up an open session for the people who have actually been through this, and I would rather do it with Athom in the room than without. :hot_beverage:

I will say the uncomfortable part too. My own thread drifted. It began as a fault report and slowly turned into something broader, and I am part of the reason for that. So I do understand the wish to keep topics focused. :slightly_smiling_face:

What I do not find fair is that the answer to drifting was to close it. Discourse has more than one tool for that. A topic can be slowed down, it can be split so a new subject gets its own home, it can be paused for a day. All of those keep the work and remove the heat. Closing removes both.

Could the rules be made clearer about how that is meant to work, and when each of those steps applies?

Fairness has to run both ways. A good tone matters to me, and I do not believe I have spoken down to anyone in that thread. If anyone feels otherwise, tell me and I will own it. :handshake:

Two things I would like to see in the rules while they are being looked at.

A diagnostic report should be a normal part of reporting a problem, not something an owner is only allowed to generate when Support asks for it. If we are expected to bring evidence, make it standard to bring it.

And we should be able to read our own report. I no longer own a Homey Pro, so I cannot check this myself, but what I am told is that it goes straight to Athom and the owner receives only a number. If that is wrong, please correct me and I will say so.

So I went and read Athom’s own privacy policy, and the answer is already there.

You can request access of the data that Athom processes about you at any time, and have these corrected or removed by sending a request to data@athom.com

That is an open invitation, so let me pass it on to everyone reading. If you have sent a diagnostic report and been told what it showed, you are allowed to ask for the data itself. Write to data@athom.com and ask for a copy of what was collected about you. You do not need permission and you do not need a support ticket for it.

I would rather not have to use that route at all. It would be far better if the report simply arrived in your own inbox at the same time it goes to Athom, or if it could be viewed in the app.

While I was in there I noticed something else. The policy is detailed about what is collected and by whom, and it names every processor down to the bookkeeping. But it does not describe the diagnostic report anywhere.

So a straight question. What does a diagnostic report actually contain, how long is it kept, and where is that written down for us to read?

One last thing, and this one is meant as an offer.

Reading a thread with 273 posts is slow, and a lot of what people report here is spread thinly across many topics. So I wrote a small Python script that pulls a topic from the public forum API and turns it into plain text I can read and search across. It is a handful of requests, no login and no scraping of anything private, and I built it to find answers faster rather than to make noise.

My guess is that some AI assistant tools are already in use on Athom’s side, Anthropic among them. So this is not about bringing in something new. It is about pointing what is already there at the forum, so what people write here ends up in the developers’ hands.

I am not asking for anything to be reopened. I am asking that the rules be shaped so the next thread like mine has somewhere to go before it needs closing.

Ulrik