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Comment by monkmartinez | Hacker News Reader

I do not operate a popular OSS project, but I have experienced the +1 spam and it sucks. The suggestions, in my opinion seem rational.

Interesting side note: With the exception of Selenium, most of signees are maintainers of JS/HTML OSS projects. I wonder if we could objectively compare JS to <lang> projects in terms of the problems mentioned in the document. For example, there is a strong correlation between +1'ers and JS repos vs. Python or vice versa. Perhaps, we could walk away with JS devs are more chatty than CPP developers when discussing issues... I don't know, just a thought.

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I think it's just monkey see->monkey do. As soon as one person said +1, everyone that saw it thought that that's just how you voted for stuff. It's the same reason you see comments on HN or reddit that just say "This." or that if you leave your shoes by the door, everyone else will do the same. I doubt these people keep doing it if you ask them not to.

There's an old story about this man who stood quietly next to a closed door in Moscow, said nothing to no one, and did nothing else of interest. Eventually others joined him, and before long a queue has formed. No one knew what they were standing in line for.

Monkey see - monkey do.

I remember one day I was walking through london with multiple hours to kill; and there was a massive line. Without anything else to do, I just stood in it. Approx 45 minutes later, I got to the front: turns out it was a sale for a clothing store. I didn't really need any clothing, but the discounts were good; so I purchased a jacket. This was 6 years ago and it's still my favourite jacket....

One of Milgram's experiments (not the infamous one) tested this, using people standing on the sidewalk looking up.

https://youtu.be/P0e6zG8IbE8

He might think he's testing conformance, but he actually just tested curiosity.

Wouldn't they at least ask after a while if that was the case?

What makes you think they didn't? I saw lots of people look up, check the people around them and keep going.

I really want to try this out myself now.

Is it really possible that people just continue standing there while not getting why they are doing it? Don't they even care to ask?

Feels like it would take just a single guy to ask: "What are we looking at?" For everyone to realize that they are acting like fools.

So try it! Elevators are wonderful places for things like this :)

Try the classic: enter an elevator and turn around to face the back - see how many copy you.

I agree that that's probably how it started, but it seems that once the cultural expectation has been set, it's hard for a single project maintainer to set a different custom just for their own project. People are going to use the conventions and communication methods that they learn elsewhere, even if you say not to in the contributing guidelines document. You might be able to get individuals to stop doing it in your project by asking them directly, but then each person has done it at least once, and you've had to ask each person to change their normal habits. Besides, as they note in the letter, there is a valid and valuable purpose to these communications, it would just be better if they were in a different place than clogging up the comment thread.

StackOverflow tackled this by intercepting plus one posts and telling people to just vote. GitHub should do the same (with starring or following).

Yeah, and now look at SO, it's got so many "rules" that you can't look cross eyed at it without breaking one of them. "You don't have enough rep!" "A minimum of 15 characters per comment." "At least 5 characters per edit." "That's been asked before." Eventually, everyone just stands in line with blinders on, forced to stare straight ahead, mouth shut, one step at a time. There's never an end once you start "tackling" these so called problems.

"This." or "+1" is a more expressive way of showing support beyond anonymous voting mechanisms.

I maintain a C repo[1] and user idiocy is much lower than what I've seen in JS projects of similar popularity. Still, I agree with these criticisms of GitHub. I hate +1 spam enough to delete such comments. Sometimes I even ban those who do it. I'm frustrated by people who open idiotic issues[2][3][4][5]. I procrastinate on bad pull requests because my options are:

1. Close the PR with little or no comment. People then think I'm an asshole.

2. Spend hours explaining why the code is terrible and why it can't be improved. In addition to being a big time sink, PR submitters often don't understand the criticisms. Half the time, they still think I'm wrong.

People even defend stuff as obviously wrong as adding a thousand lines of GPL'd code to an Apache-licensed project.[6] Then they say I should remove .gitignore support from ag because it doesn't implement 100% of .gitignore syntax. As if users would be happier with tons of extraneous results instead of some extraneous results.

A lot of this is cultural, but GitHub could help steer things in a better direction with the features proposed in this letter. I hope they take this letter seriously.

1. https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

2. User accuses ag of hard-locking his computer: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/issues/791

3. User wants ag to always print filenames, unlike every other tool out there: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/issues/749

4. User wants ag to replace PCRE with a totally different, incompatible regex library: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/issues/698

5. User aliases 'ag' to 'grep', then complains ag doesn't work: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/issues/578

6. https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/pull/614

I actually hesitate to really "watch" repos because the sheer volume of email generated is staggering. I take my hat off to those who run successful OSS projects. Thank you!

About number 5. I don't see anyone complaining about anything.

Maybe "complain" is too strong, but he created a GitHub issue –notifying several hundred people– without running ag --version. Heck, he didn't even look at the output of his command. It was immediately obvious to me, from the limited information he provided, that it was a bash alias.

Looks like a genuine mistake. He apologised. You've never done something dumb and didn't realise it?

I think this gets to the root of the GH problem

To the person raising the issue it's a simple mistake, sorry.

To the person that has to deal with it, it's yet another issue being raised where the reporter didn't follow the necessary steps to diagnose the problem themselves and (implicitly) expected a bunch of other people to apply their own time to solving it.

If the "New Issue" form had a place where the reporter was asked to paste the output from ag --version then it might have caught the accident before it wasted the developers' time.

I think it's an over reaction to describe the issue as a complaint, but it is an example of how the GitHub UI forces project admins to deal with incomplete and poorly investigated issues from users.

All successful products will have stupid users. If you don't want to have stupid users, don't write successful software.

A mistake, I can understand. But each issue I linked to was not a mistake. Each one was the end result of a series of mistakes stemming from a combination of ignorance, negligence, and (occasionally) incompetence.

Have I done dumb things without realizing? Of course.[1] But in almost 20 years of software development, I have never created issues resembling the ones I linked to. Bug reports are seen by hundreds of people and take up valuable developer time, so I make sure mine are useful.

To use an analogy: Say I'm giving a talk to an audience of a hundred people. I wouldn't do it extemporaneously, without slides, then walk away in the middle of Q&A. And if I did, I wouldn't call it a mistake. I'd call it being a terrible presenter. Yet that's what bad bug reports are like:

User (notifying hundreds of people): "It doesn't work."

Dev: "What version are you using? What error messages do you see? How are you running it?"

User: * crickets *

It's gotten bad enough that I wrote a short post on how to report bugs.[2]

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7145451

2. http://geoff.greer.fm/2015/08/15/how-to-write-good-bug-repor...

Why would you even respond to a bug report that was "it doesn't work."

Such a vague report tells you all you need to know about whether it's going to be worth your time trying to work with the person who submitted it. Close it immediately as non-actionable.

As much as I respect you for The Silver Surfer, that 5th issue was a very silly mistake.

Do you really want people to be afraid to report an issue in case it's something silly/not an actual problem? Would that be better?

I guess it depends on the project and its contribution guidelines.

> Do you really want people to be afraid to report an issue in case it's something silly/not an actual problem? Would that be better?

I seriously doubt the pendulum will swing too far in the opposite direction. Right now, the majority of created issues are close to useless. If those people took five minutes of their own time to troubleshoot, it would save others hours.

True, but it's still user problems that aren't problems with the software itself. Far too often you get people who want help with _everything_ on a project, from installing the right language, their editor and so on when it's not something that really concerns you.

SourceForge fixed the +1 issue recently.

The same question about JS repos struck me. I suspect that if you write a shared letter then you just ask your network to sign it instead of <random other person from different ecosystem>, but I would be curious to know if these grievances are disproportionate in different communities.

I'd like to think that someone who writes this kind of letter would take such a thing into account. It's really possible that there is a strong correlation between a language and people being more involved with Github. I wouldn't be surprised that many developers from other language ecosystems just don't care.

Stack Overflow tried preventing +1/-1 comments[1], and the community came to the consensus[2][3] that those comments can be useful.

[1]https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/277314

[2]http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/277319

[3]http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/283935

From skimming, they found "+/-1, because REASON" to be valuable, not "+/-1". Indeed, in the open letter, they mention these are valuable, but the current implementation is a pain.

Google Code has primarily been used for Chromium's issue tracker, but they have a star system for exactly this reason.

You can sort something by stars, but it's bad etiquette there for a user to comment +1 rather than just star.

Yep. The problem is that some users are not aware of the conventions, and often you see on the Android Google Code repo "+1" or something along the lines of "Google plz fix this".

This becomes heavily apparent when someone posts an Android issue directly onto the Android subreddit. I suspect the same could happen with GitHub issues. When you see others posting "+1", then others follow the same practice.

It seems to me that it would be a good idea to have a special-case that turns a comment where the only content is "+1" into a star request instead.

I believe GitHub translates :+1: into a thumbs-up icon, so you'd probably want to limit your filter so it only applies to non-contributors.

But still, yeah, it would be fairly trivial to require posts to be more than +1, or to display a warning when anyone starts a post with :+1:

I agree that the suggestions are great; I'm also generally happy to see a letter like this take a clear tone without being aggressive or overtly confrontational. Re: the prevalence JS/HTML projects, I think that may just be a matter of simple base popularity; the web is the most popular development platform, and JS is the most used language on github (githut.info has great stats on this). If the letter gains steam, I'm sure we could expect project maintainers from other ecosystems to get on board.

I noticed that most of the signers are maintaning JS/HTML projects too.

I wonder if those types of projects are more likely to have these problems (larger userbase? Less experienced userbase? just different userbase?)? It could also just be a coincidence that they knew each other because they work on similar things, and a group of people who knew each other are the ones who wrote the letter.

+1 isn't spam. It's valuable. However the implementation of how people can +1 an issue that's very important to them is the point. There should be a voting system.

Spam would indicate that +1 adds no value.. But it does! If I have an issue with no comments, no indication of its importance to the users, then I would deprioritize that issue over another one that has lots of activity.

+1 is valuable, it's just the form that Github forces it into (comments) winds up looking spammy. Make it a counter - simple enough.

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